by Joy Maitland | Aug 5, 2026 | Board Members, Board Trustees, CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, General Managers, Heads of Divisions, Human Resources (HR), Leadership Development, Managing Directors, Middle Managers, Non-Executive Board Members, Senior Managers, Women Leaders
The organisations most likely to succeed tomorrow may not be those with the best answers. They may be those willing to question today’s success.
Leadership curiosity has become one of the most important competitive advantages an organisation can develop.
In the early 1980s, Intel faced one of the most important decisions in its history.
Competition in the memory chip market had intensified, and the company’s future was becoming increasingly uncertain.
During a discussion with Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, then CEO Andy Grove asked a deceptively simple question.
“If we got fired and the Board brought in a new CEO, what do you think they would do?”
Moore paused before replying.
“They’d probably get us out of the memory business.”
Grove looked at him and said,
“Then why don’t we walk out the door, come back in and do it ourselves?”
That single question changed Intel’s future.
More importantly, it revealed something profound about leadership.
Sometimes the greatest threat to future success is not what we don’t know.
It is what we have stopped questioning.
Success Can Become a Blind Spot
Experience is one of leadership’s greatest strengths.
It helps us recognise patterns, make informed decisions and avoid repeating past mistakes.
However, experience also carries an often-overlooked risk.
Success reinforces confidence.
Confidence reinforces assumptions.
Over time, assumptions can quietly become certainty.
Processes that once created competitive advantage become untouchable.
Practices that once challenged conventional thinking become the convention itself.
Without noticing, organisations stop asking the questions that made them successful in the first place.
Microsoft Chose to Become a Learning Organisation
More than three decades later, Satya Nadella faced a different challenge at Microsoft.
The company remained hugely successful, yet many believed its culture had become inward-looking and overly certain of its own expertise.
Nadella’s response was remarkably simple.
Microsoft would become a company of “learn-it-alls” rather than “know-it-alls.”
It was far more than a slogan.
It represented a cultural commitment to curiosity over certainty.
Listening over defending.
Learning over proving.
People were encouraged to ask better questions, challenge assumptions and remain open to new ideas, regardless of seniority.
That shift helped transform not only Microsoft’s culture but also its ability to innovate in an industry changing at extraordinary speed.
Curiosity Is Becoming a Strategic Advantage
Artificial intelligence has made knowledge more accessible than at any point in history.
Information is no longer the scarce resource it once was.
Curiosity is.
The organisations that will thrive are unlikely to be those with the most information.
They will be those that continue asking difficult questions after everyone else believes the answers are obvious.
Curiosity has become a strategic capability.
Not because leaders lack confidence.
But because they recognise that confidence should never replace learning.
The Leadership Challenge
Every organisation develops habits.
Every leadership team develops beliefs.
Every successful strategy creates assumptions.
The important question is not whether those assumptions exist.
It is whether they are still true.
Leaders who remain curious create organisations that continue adapting.
Leaders who become certain often create organisations that slowly stop learning.
Insight: The organisations most at risk are rarely those that know too little. They are often those that believe they already know enough.
In an environment where technology, markets and customer expectations continue to evolve, curiosity has become far more than a personal characteristic.
It is a competitive advantage.
Because the future will not belong to organisations that defend yesterday’s answers.
It will belong to those that continue asking tomorrow’s questions.
Leadership curiosity is not simply about asking more questions. It is about creating a culture where long-held assumptions can be challenged before competitors challenge them for you.
Leadership Question
If an entirely new leadership team took over your organisation tomorrow, what long-held assumption would they challenge first.
The Right Conversation Can Change Everything. Let’s Talk.
by Atiya Sheikh | Aug 5, 2026 | Board Members, Board Trustees, CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, Emerging Leaders, General Managers, Heads of Divisions, Human Resources (HR), Junior Managers, Leadership Development, Managing Directors, Middle Managers, Non-Executive Board Members, Senior Managers, Women Leaders
As artificial intelligence becomes better at producing answers, the capabilities that distinguish exceptional people are changing.
For most of history, intelligence was limited by access to information. Today, it is increasingly limited by the quality of the questions we ask.
For generations, expertise was often measured by what people knew.
The person with the most knowledge frequently became the expert in the room.
Artificial intelligence is quietly changing that.
Today, information is available almost instantly. AI can draft reports, summarise meetings, analyse data, generate presentations and answer increasingly complex questions within seconds. Tasks that once required specialist knowledge can now be completed by almost anyone with access to the right technology.
This is one of the most significant shifts in the modern workplace.
Not because knowledge no longer matters.
But because knowledge alone is no longer enough.
AI Is Making Answers Cheaper
Throughout history, access to information created advantage.
Today, information has become abundant.
Increasingly, the competitive advantage lies elsewhere.
As AI makes producing acceptable answers faster, cheaper and more accessible, the value of simply having information inevitably declines.
What becomes more valuable is something AI cannot easily replicate.
- Judgement.
- Discernment.
- Curiosity.
- The ability to ask the question nobody else thought to ask.
- The confidence to challenge an answer that appears convincing.
- The wisdom to recognise when context changes everything.
Research reflects this shift. The World Economic Forum continues to rank analytical thinking among the most important skills for the future, alongside resilience, curiosity and lifelong learning. At the same time, organisations are investing heavily in AI while recognising that technology alone does not create competitive advantage. It is how people apply it that matters.
The New Definition of Expertise
Perhaps the most important change is not what AI can do.
It is what people now need to do differently.
For decades, expertise often meant providing answers.
Increasingly, expertise means framing the problem.
The quality of an AI-generated response depends almost entirely on the quality of the thinking that guides it.
A poorly framed question often produces a perfectly convincing—but fundamentally unhelpful—answer.
The opposite is also true.
A thoughtful question can unlock insights that would otherwise remain hidden.
In many organisations, this changes the nature of leadership.
The best leaders will not necessarily be those who know the most.
They will be those who help others ask better questions, challenge assumptions and think more deeply before acting.
The Hidden Risk
There is another consequence that receives far less attention.
Many professionals developed their judgement by completing the routine tasks that AI increasingly performs.
- Drafting papers.
- Analysing spreadsheets.
- Preparing presentations.
- Reviewing contracts.
Those activities were never simply about producing work.
They were how people learned to think.
If organisations automate those experiences without deliberately creating new opportunities for learning, they risk accelerating efficiency while quietly slowing the development of judgement.
The question is no longer whether AI will replace certain tasks.
The question is how future generations will develop the wisdom those tasks once created.
The Leadership Challenge
Leaders therefore face a different challenge from the one many expected.
The goal is not simply to encourage people to use AI.
Nor is it to compete with it.
The goal is to develop capabilities that become more valuable because AI exists.
- Critical thinking.
- Judgement.
- Creativity.
- Influence.
- Ethical decision-making.
- Systems thinking.
- The ability to connect ideas that appear unrelated.
These have always mattered.
Today, they matter even more.
Because as answers become increasingly accessible, the ability to recognise the right question becomes a defining competitive advantage.
Insight: Artificial intelligence is reducing the value of producing acceptable answers. It is increasing the value of recognising which questions deserve to be asked.
The organisations that succeed over the next decade will not simply adopt AI more quickly.
They will develop people who know when to trust it, when to challenge it and, perhaps most importantly, when to ask an entirely different question.
Because the future will not belong to those who can produce the fastest answer.
It will belong to those who can ask the question no machine thought to ask.
Leadership Question
As AI becomes better at providing answers, are you developing people who know how to ask better questions?
The Right Conversation Can Change Everything. Let’s Talk.
Microsoft Work Trend Index
by Joy Maitland | Aug 5, 2026 | Board Members, Board Trustees, CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, General Managers, Heads of Divisions, Human Resources (HR), Leadership Development, Managing Directors, Middle Managers, News & Articles, Non-Executive Board Members, Senior Managers, Women Leaders
Artificial intelligence isn’t making universities less relevant. It is forcing us to rediscover what higher education was always supposed to achieve.
Several years ago, inemmo was commissioned by a UK university to investigate a growing concern.
An increasing number of students were leaving during, or shortly after, their first year.
The university wanted to understand why.
What began as a study into student retention became something much more significant.
As we listened to students describe their experiences, it became clear that they weren’t simply questioning university.
They were questioning value.
Then one student said something that has stayed with me ever since.
“I’m only staying because I need the piece of paper.”
At the time, it sounded unsettling.
Today, it sounds remarkably prophetic.
They Weren’t Rejecting Education
As the interviews progressed, a clear picture began to emerge.
Long before ChatGPT entered everyday conversation, students were already asking questions that feel strikingly relevant today.
“Why am I paying to sit in lectures when I can learn much of this online?”
Some described watching YouTube tutorials that explained concepts more clearly than the lectures they had attended earlier that day.
Others spoke about reading research papers directly or completing specialist online courses.
Several questioned whether they would be better off gaining practical experience while avoiding years of student debt.
It would have been easy to conclude that students no longer valued learning.
The opposite was true.
They valued learning enormously.
What they questioned was where learning created its greatest value.
Perhaps the most surprising finding was not what they wanted to learn.
It was who they wanted to learn from.
Students repeatedly asked for greater exposure to people who had actually done the work.
People who had built businesses.
Led organisations.
Designed products.
Negotiated difficult decisions.
Made mistakes.
Recovered.
Started again.
They respected academic expertise.
However, what they were really asking for wasn’t more information.
It was interpretation.
Not another theory.
But what happened when that theory collided with reality.
Not simply what worked.
But why it worked.
When it failed.
What nobody anticipated.
And what they would do differently today.
One student captured it perfectly.
“Teach me what happened when the theory met reality.”
Perhaps, without realising it, they were asking for something that cannot simply be downloaded.
Judgement.
The Faculty Saw It Too
Interestingly, many faculty members recognised similar challenges.
Several spoke openly about becoming frustrated with traditional lecture-based teaching.
They wanted to spend less time delivering information and more time helping students think critically, solve problems, challenge assumptions and prepare for professional life.
Looking back, perhaps both students and academics had recognised something the rest of us had not.
The real value of higher education was never simply information.
It was transformation.
Information changes what people know.
Education changes how people think.
Those are not the same thing.
Then AI Changed the Conversation
When artificial intelligence entered everyday life, many predicted it would transform education.
Perhaps it has done something even more significant.
It has exposed a question we should have been asking all along.
If universities are no longer competing on access to information…
…where does their greatest value now lie?
Knowledge has become increasingly accessible.
The scarce resource is something altogether different.
Judgement.
Discernment.
Curiosity.
Perspective.
The ability to recognise nuance.
The wisdom to know when artificial intelligence is wrong.
The confidence to make decisions when there is no obvious answer.
These qualities cannot simply be downloaded.
They have to be developed.
Perhaps We’ve Been Measuring Different Things
To be fair, many employers recognised this long before artificial intelligence arrived.
Academic qualifications may open the door, but they have rarely secured the job on their own.
For many years, organisations have increasingly relied on competency-based interviews, assessment centres, case studies and psychometric assessments to understand how candidates think, solve problems and work with others.
Employers have long understood that knowledge alone is not enough.
Capability matters.
What artificial intelligence changes is not the importance of capability.
It changes the relative value of knowledge.
As information becomes easier to access, the ability to interpret it, question it and apply it wisely becomes even more valuable.
Perhaps that is where higher education and employment are beginning to converge.
Universities have traditionally excelled at developing knowledge.
Employers increasingly seek judgement, adaptability, collaboration and the ability to apply that knowledge in unfamiliar situations.
The challenge for the future may not be choosing one over the other.
It may be integrating both more effectively.
The University of the Future
Universities have survived wars.
Economic crises.
Political upheaval.
Industrial revolutions.
They will adapt to artificial intelligence too.
If anything, they may become more important than ever.
But perhaps their purpose will become clearer.
The institutions that thrive may not be those with the biggest libraries or the longest reading lists.
They may be those that become the world’s greatest developers of judgement.
Places where academic rigour is strengthened by practical experience.
Where researchers work alongside entrepreneurs.
Engineers alongside psychologists.
Clinicians alongside business leaders.
Military officers alongside behavioural scientists.
Not because theory has become less valuable.
But because theory gains meaning when it meets reality.
Perhaps universities have never simply been in the knowledge business.
Knowledge has always been the starting point.
Transformation has always been the destination.
Helping people think more clearly.
Question more deeply.
Judge more wisely.
Act more responsibly.
Artificial intelligence has not diminished the importance of higher education.
If anything, it has reminded us why it matters.
Because information can now be found almost anywhere.
Judgement cannot.
Insight: Artificial intelligence has not diminished the importance of education. It has reminded us what education has always been about. In a world where information is abundant, the institutions that create the greatest value will be those that develop judgement, curiosity, adaptability and the confidence to navigate problems that have no textbook answer.
Leadership Question
If information has become abundant, what is the one capability every graduate should possess before entering the workplace?
The Right Conversation Can Change Everything. Let’s Talk.
The future of jobs: World Economic Forum
by Joy Maitland | Mar 29, 2026 | Board Members, Board Trustees, CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, General Managers, Heads of Divisions, Leadership Development, Managing Directors, News & Articles, Non-Executive Board Members, Women Leaders
Leadership Visibility and Control: What Leaders May Not Be Seeing
Leadership visibility and control often create a strong sense of certainty at the top of organisations. Information flows upward, decisions are made at pace, and leaders operate with a sense of oversight.
Senior leaders have access to information. They sit close to decision-making and shape direction. As a result, it often appears that they hold a clear and accurate view of what is happening across the organisation.
However, in complex organisations, that visibility is rarely complete.
As information moves upward, people filter it, summarise it and, at times, unintentionally reshape it. Context reduces. Nuance disappears. Signals soften. Consequently, what reaches the executive level remains coherent, but not always complete.
The greater risk is not a lack of information. It is confidence built on partial visibility.
In large organisations, decisions do not travel unchanged. Teams interpret them, adapt them and sometimes dilute them as they move from strategy into execution. By the time they reach the front line, delivery can differ in meaningful ways from what leaders originally intended.
This does not reflect a lack of capability. Rather, it reflects the reality of operating at scale.
At the same time, systems can appear to work well. Reports remain accurate. Dashboards stay current. Performance looks stable. However, these mechanisms rarely show how people experience, interpret and apply decisions across the organisation.
Over time, this creates a subtle but widening gap between strategic intent and operational reality.
Insight: At scale, leaders often mistake partial visibility for full understanding and misread what is really happening.
This is rarely a failure of data. It is a failure of interpretation shaped by distance from execution.
The strongest leadership teams recognise this limitation. They do not assume that what they see reflects reality.
Instead, they test it.
They look beyond formal reporting and pay attention to where decisions feel clear at the top but less so in execution.
Because this is where distortion appears.
Control does not come from information alone. It comes from verifying how decisions are understood and applied in practice.
Without this, confidence can become misleading.
Leadership visibility is never absolute. It must be continually re-established.
Leadership Question: What might be happening in your organisation that your current information does not fully reveal?
by Joy Maitland | Mar 29, 2026 | Board Members, Board Trustees, CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, General Managers, Heads of Divisions, Leadership Development, Managing Directors, News & Articles, Non-Executive Board Members, Senior Managers
Growth is often seen as a clear sign of success. The organisation is expanding. Opportunities are increasing. Momentum is building. On the surface, this signals progress.
Leadership capacity and growth are often assumed to move together.
Growth signals progress. It creates opportunity, expands reach and strengthens market position. As a result, it is widely seen as a positive indicator of organisational success.
However, growth also introduces complexity.
As organisations expand, structures become more layered. Dependencies increase. Decisions carry broader consequences. Consequently, coordination becomes more demanding.
Leadership capacity must evolve alongside this.
The challenge is that growth often outpaces that evolution.
Many leadership teams continue to operate using approaches that worked at a smaller scale. Senior leaders remain closely involved in operational detail. Decision-making stays centralised. Informal coordination continues to play a significant role.
Initially, this feels effective.
Over time, however, the organisation becomes harder to manage. Decisions take longer. Alignment requires more effort. Senior leaders become increasingly stretched.
This does not reflect a lack of capability. Instead, it signals that the organisation has outgrown the leadership model that once made it successful. The difficulty is not capability. It is that leaders are being asked to let go of the very behaviours that made them successful.
More importantly, growth changes the nature of leadership itself.
It requires a shift from direct control to system design. From personal oversight to distributed accountability. From solving problems to enabling the organisation to solve them without constant escalation.
This transition rarely happens explicitly.
Instead, leadership teams often respond by working harder, staying closer to decisions and absorbing more complexity themselves. As a result, leadership becomes a constraint rather than an enabler.
The organisation continues to grow, but execution becomes less efficient.
Insight: Growth does not automatically create scale advantage. It often exposes the limits of existing leadership capacity.
This rarely fails loudly at first.
Performance may remain strong. Results may continue to improve. However, more effort is required to sustain the same level of output.
Coordination begins to consume increasing executive time. Leaders become involved in issues that should no longer require their attention. Consequently, leadership energy shifts from creating advantage to maintaining stability.
The organisation appears successful from the outside, while becoming more demanding to run from within.
At this point, many organisations respond in familiar ways. They add more people. They introduce additional layers. They increase coordination.
However, these actions often reinforce the existing model rather than evolve it.
In many cases, organisations recruit for continuity rather than challenge. They bring in individuals who can operate within the current system, rather than those who might question it.
This is understandable. Under pressure, disruption can feel risky.
Yet this is precisely where leadership needs to shift.
Scaling an organisation does not simply require more capacity. It often requires different thinking, different behaviours and, at times, different leadership profiles.
This may mean bringing in voices that challenge established ways of working. It may mean redesigning roles in ways that feel unfamiliar. It may also mean acknowledging that past success does not automatically translate into future effectiveness.
The difficulty is that organisations rarely know exactly what they need next. They only recognise the limits of what has worked so far.
That is where leadership courage becomes critical.
Insight: Growth does not fail because organisations lack effort. It fails when they continue to scale what no longer fits.
The most effective leadership teams recognise this inflection point. They do not simply add capacity. They evolve how leadership itself operates.
They understand that scaling the organisation requires more than growth. It requires change.
Leadership Question: Is your organisation growing beyond the capacity of your current leadership model?
by Joy Maitland | Mar 4, 2026 | Board Members, Board Trustees, CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, General Managers, Heads of Divisions, Leadership Development, Managing Directors, News & Articles, Non-Executive Board Members
Alignment is not created by agreement but by honest engagement.
Leadership teams often appear aligned on the surface. Meetings run smoothly and decisions conclude with agreement. Yet the effectiveness of a leadership team is often shaped by the conversations it quietly avoids.
Many leadership teams appear harmonious.
Meetings run smoothly. Discussions remain respectful. Decisions often conclude with apparent consensus.
On the surface, everything looks constructive.
However, a different dynamic sometimes sits beneath that harmony.
Certain issues rarely surface in discussion. Tensions between functions remain unspoken. Meanwhile, senior voices often go unchallenged even when others quietly disagree.
In most cases, this does not happen because leaders lack integrity. Instead, it happens because people want to maintain collegiality and avoid unnecessary friction.
Nevertheless, avoidance carries a cost.
Insight: Leadership teams rarely fail because they disagree too much. They fail because they disagree too little.
When teams avoid difficult conversations, uncertainty spreads quietly through the organisation. Different groups interpret silence in different ways. As a result, assumptions begin to replace clarity.
Over time, unresolved tensions grow harder to address.
Meanwhile, the strongest leadership teams operate differently. They surface disagreement early. They question ideas openly. In addition, they test assumptions before decisions become commitments.
Importantly, these conversations do not create hostility. Instead, they create clarity.
Honest discussion builds a deeper form of trust. People gain confidence that difficult issues will not remain hidden. Consequently, alignment becomes stronger rather than weaker.
In practice, disagreement is not the real risk. Avoidance is.
Leadership teams rarely struggle because debate becomes too intense. More often, they struggle because politeness replaces honesty.
Alignment does not emerge from constant agreement. It emerges from the willingness to engage with difficult questions directly.
Leadership Question: What conversation is your leadership team avoiding right now?
The Right Conversation Can Change Everything. Let’s Talk.
