TL;DR: March’s Go Flux Yourself explores what good leadership looks like in an AI-driven world. Spoiler: it’s not Donald Trump. From psychological safety and the “Lost Einsteins” to lessons from the inventor of plastic, it examines why innovation without inclusion is reckless – and why collaboration, kindness, and asking better questions might be our best defence against digital delusion and existential drift …
Image created on Midjourney
The future
“Leadership is the art of harnessing the efforts of others to achieve greatness.”
Donald Trump’s America-first agenda may appeal to the base instincts of populism, a nationalist fever dream dressed up as economic strategy. However, it is hopelessly outdated as a leadership model for a globally connected, AI-enabled future.
In fact, it’s worse than that. It’s actively regressive. Trumpism, and the rise of Trumpian imitators across the globe, isn’t just shutting borders. It’s shutting minds, too, and that’s more debilitating for society. It trades in fear, not foresight. It rewards silence over dissent. And in doing so, it stifles precisely the kind of leadership the future demands.
Because let’s be clear: the coming decades will not be defined by those who shout the loudest or build the tallest walls. They will be defined by those who keep channels open – not just for trade, but for ideas. For difference. For disagreement. For discovery.
That starts with listening. And not just listening politely, but listening generatively – creating the psychological space where people feel safe enough to share the thought that might change everything.
At the recent Workhuman Live Forum in London, Harvard’s Amy Edmondson – a global authority on leadership and psychological safety – warned of the “almost immeasurable” consequences of holding back. In her research, 93% of senior leaders admitted that their silence had tangible costs. Not theoretical. Not abstract. Tangible. Safety failures. Wasted resources. Poor decisions. Quiet disengagement. And perhaps worst of all, missed opportunities to learn.
Why do we hold back, and not speak up? Because we’re human. And humans are wired to avoid looking stupid. We’d rather be safe than smart. Edmondson calls it “impression management”, and we’re all fluent in it. From the start of primary school, we learn not to raise our hand unless we’re sure of the answer. By the time we enter the workforce, that instinct is second nature.
But in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world – after a chorus in the early pandemic days, five years ago, I’m hearing this used a lot more by business leaders now – that instinct is no longer helpful. It’s dangerous. Because real innovation doesn’t happen in safe, silent rooms. It happens in teams willing to fail fast, speak up, and challenge the status quo. In rooms where “I think we might be wrong” is not a career-ending statement, but a spark.
So how should leaders lead? The quotation that begins this month’s Go Flux Yourself is from Ken Frazier, former CEO of Merck, and was cited by Edmundson, who heard it in one of her sessions. It’s worth repeating: “Leadership is the art of harnessing the efforts of others to achieve greatness.”
This brings us to Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, and his powerful message at Talent Connect and Sancroft Convene, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Raman argues that we are moving out of the “knowledge economy” – where technical proficiency was king – and into the “innovation economy”, where our most human skills become our greatest assets.
He lists them as the five Cs: communication, creativity, compassion, courage, and curiosity. Let’s make it six: collaboration. These are no longer “soft skills” but the defining skills of the age. They allow us to build trust, forge connections, and work across differences. They are, as Raman says, why we are the apex species on the planet.
But here’s the catch: while these skills are distributed broadly across the population, the opportunity to develop and express them is not. Enter the “Lost Einsteins” – those with the potential to innovate but without the credentials, connections, or capital to turn ideas into impact. Economist Raj Chetty’s landmark study found that children from wealthy families are 10-times more likely to become inventors than equally talented peers from lower-income backgrounds.
This is a global failure. We are squandering talent on an industrial scale – not because of a lack of ability, but because of a lack of inclusion. And that’s a leadership failure.
We need leaders who can spot and elevate the quiet genius in the room, who don’t confuse volume with value, and who can look beyond the CV and see the potential in a person’s questions, not just their answers.
And we need to stop romanticising “hero” innovation – the lone genius in a garage – and embrace the truth: innovation is a team sport. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci, as biographer Walter Isaacson points out, was a great collaborator. He succeeded because he listened as much as he led.
Which brings us back to psychological safety – the necessary precondition for team-based innovation. Without it, diversity becomes dysfunction. With it, it becomes dynamite.
Edmondson’s research shows that diverse teams outperform homogenous ones only when psychological safety is high. Without that safety, diversity leads to miscommunication, mistrust, and missed potential. But with it? You get the full benefit of varied perspectives, lived experiences, and cognitive styles. You get the kind of high-quality conversations that lead to breakthroughs.
But these conversations don’t happen by accident. They require framing, invitation, and modelling. They require leaders to say – out loud – things like: “I’ve never flown a perfect flight” (as one airline captain Edmondson studied told his new crew). Or “I need to hear from you”. Or even: “I don’t know the answer. Let’s figure it out together.”
KeyAnna Schmiedl, Workhuman’s Chief Human Experience Officer, put it beautifully in a conversation we had at the Live Forum event: leadership today is less about having the answer and more about creating the conditions for answers to emerge. It’s about making work more human – not through performative gestures, but through daily, deliberate acts of kindness. Not niceness. Kindness.
Niceness avoids conflict. Kindness leans into it, constructively. Niceness says, “That’s fine”. Kindness says, “I hear you – but here’s what we need.” Niceness smooths things over. Kindness builds things up.
And kindness is deeply pragmatic. It’s not about making everyone happy. It’s about making sure everyone is heard. Because the next big idea could come from the intern. From the quiet one. From the woman in trainers, not the man in a suit.
This reframing of leadership is already underway. Schmiedl herself never thought of herself as a leader – until others started reflecting it back to her. Not because she had all the answers, but because she had a way of asking the right questions, of creating rooms where people showed up fully, where difference wasn’t just tolerated but treasured.
So what does all this mean for the rest of us?
It means asking better questions. Not “Does anyone disagree?” (cue crickets). But “Who has a different perspective?” It means listening more than speaking. It means noticing who hasn’t spoken yet – and inviting them in. It means, as Edmondson says, getting curious about the dogs that don’t bark. Other “good questions” include: “What are we missing?” Also: “Please can you explain that further?”
And it means remembering that the goal is not psychological safety itself. The goal is excellence. Innovation. Learning. Fairness. Safety is just the soil in which those things can grow.
The future belongs to the leaders who know how to listen, invite dissent, ask good questions, and, ultimately, understand that the art of leadership is not dominance, but dialogue.
Because the next Einstein is out there. She, he, or they just haven’t been heard yet.
The present
“We’re gearing up for this year to be a year where you’ll have some ‘oh shit’ moments,” said Jack Clark, policy chief at Anthropic, the $40 billion AI start-up behind the Claude chatbot, earlier this year. He wasn’t exaggerating. From melting servers at OpenAI (more on this below) to the dizzying pace of model upgrades, 2025 already feels like we’re living through the future on fast-forward.
And yet, amid all the noise, hype, and existential hand-wringing, something quieter – but arguably more profound – is happening: people are remembering the value of connection.
This March, I had the pleasure of speaking at a Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) virtual event for members in South East London. The session, held on Shrove Tuesday, was fittingly titled “Standing Out: The Power of Human Leadership in an AI World”. Between pancake references and puns (some better than others), I explored what it means to lead with humanity in an age when digital tools dominate every dashboard, inbox, and conversation.
The talk was personal, anchored in my own experience as a business owner, a journalist, and a human surfing the digital tide. I shared my CHUI framework – Community, Health, Understanding, and Interconnectedness – as a compass for turbulent times. Because let’s face it: the world is messy right now. Geopolitical uncertainty is high. Domestic pressures are mounting. AI is changing faster than our ability to regulate or even comprehend it. And loneliness – real, bone-deep isolation – is quietly eroding the foundations of workplaces and communities.
And yet, there are bright spots. And they’re often found in the places we least expect – like virtual networking events, Slack channels, and local business groups.
Since that FSB session, I’ve connected with a flurry of new people, each conversation sparking unexpected insight or opportunity. One such connection was Bryan Altimas, founder of Riverside Court Consulting. Bryan’s story perfectly exemplifies how leadership and collaboration can scale, even in a solo consultancy.
After the pandemic drove a surge in cybercrime, Altimas responded not by hiring a traditional team but by building a nimble, global network of 15 cybersecurity specialists – from policy experts to ethical hackers based as far afield as Mauritius. “Most FSB members don’t worry about cybersecurity until it’s too late,” he told me in our follow-up chat. But instead of fear-mongering, Altimas and his team educate. They equip small businesses to be just secure enough that criminals look elsewhere – the digital equivalent of fitting a burglar alarm on your front door while your neighbour leaves theirs ajar.
What struck me most about Altimas wasn’t just his technical acumen, but his collaborative philosophy. Through FSB’s Business Crimes Forum, he’s sat on roundtables with the London Mayor’s Office and contributed to parliamentary discussions. These conversations – forged through community, not competition – have directly generated new client relationships and policy influence. “It’s about raising the floor,” he said. “We’re stronger when we work together.”
That sentiment feels increasingly urgent. In an age where cybercriminals operate within sophisticated, decentralised networks, small businesses can’t afford to work in silos. Our defence must be networked, too – built on shared knowledge, mutual accountability, and trust.
And yet, many governments seem to be doing the opposite. The recent technical capability notice issued to Apple – which led to the withdrawal of advanced data protection services from UK devices – is a case in point. Altimas called it “the action of a digitally illiterate administration”, one that weakens security for all citizens while failing to deter the real bad actors. The irony? In trying to increase control, we’ve actually made ourselves more vulnerable.
This brings us back to the role of small business leaders and, more broadly, to the power of community. As I told the audience at the FSB event, the future of work isn’t just about AI. It’s about who can thrive in an AI world. And the answer, increasingly, is those who can collaborate, communicate, and connect across differences.
In a world where 90% of online content is projected to be AI-generated this year, authentic human interaction becomes not just a nice-to-have, but a business differentiator. Relationship capital is now as valuable as financial capital. And unlike content, it can’t be automated.
That’s why I encourage business leaders to show up. Join the webinars. Say yes to the follow-up call. Ask the awkward questions. Be curious. Some of the most valuable conversations I’ve had recently – including with Altimas – started with nothing more than a LinkedIn connection or a quick post-event “thanks for your talk”.
This isn’t about nostalgia or rejecting technology. As I said in my FSB talk, tech is not the enemy of human connection – it’s how we use it that matters. The question is whether our tools bring us closer to others or push us further into isolation.
The paradox of the AI age is that the more powerful our technologies become, the more essential our humanity is. AI can optimise, analyse, and synthesise, but it can’t empathise, mentor, or build trust in a room. It certainly can’t make someone feel seen, valued, or safe enough to speak up.
That’s where leadership comes in. As Edmondson noted, psychological safety doesn’t happen by accident. It must be modelled, invited, and reinforced. In many cases, work must be reframed to make clear that anyone and everyone can make a difference, alongside an acknowledgement by leaders that things will inevitably go wrong. And as Raman said, the next phase of work will be defined not by who codes the best, but by who collaborates the most.
Our best bet for surviving the “oh shit” moments of 2025 is not to go it alone, but to lean in together. As FSB members, for instance, we are not just business owners. We are nodes in a network. And that network – messy, human, imperfect – might just be our greatest asset.
The past
In 1907, Leo Baekeland changed the world. A Belgian-born chemist working in New York, he created Bakelite – the world’s first fully synthetic plastic. It was, by every measure, a breakthrough. Hard, durable, and capable of being moulded into almost any shape (the clue is in the name – plastikos, from the Greek, meaning “capable of being shaped”), Bakelite marked the dawn of the modern plastics industry.
For the first time, humankind wasn’t limited to what nature could provide. We could manufacture our own materials. These materials would soon find their way into everything from telephones to televisions, jewellery to jet engines.
Baekeland had no idea what he was unleashing. And perhaps that’s the point.
More than a century later, we’re drowning in the aftershocks of that innovation. At Economist Impact’s 10th Sustainability Week earlier this month – once again in the quietly majestic surroundings of Sancroft Covene – I had the pleasure of moderating a panel titled “Preventing plastics pollution through novel approaches”. I even dressed for the occasion, sporting a nautical bow tie (always good to keep the theme on-brand), and kicked things off with a bit of self-aware humour about my surname.
One of the panellists, Kris Renwick of Reckitt, represented the makers of Harpic – the toilet cleaner founded by none other than Harry Pickup, surely the most illustrious bearer of my surname. (Although late actor Ronald Pickup has a case.) There’s a certain poetry in that Harry made his name scrubbing away society’s waste.
Especially when set against another panellist, Alexandra Cousteau – granddaughter of Jacques-Yves, the pioneering oceanographer who co-invented the Aqua-Lung and brought the mysteries of the sea to the world. Cousteau, who first set sail on an expedition at just four months old, told the audience that there is 50% less sea life today than in her grandfather’s time.
Let that sink in. Half of all marine life gone – in just three generations.
And plastics are a big part of the problem. We now produce around 460 million tonnes of plastic every year. Of that, 350 million tonnes becomes waste – a staggering 91% is never recycled. Contrary to popular belief, very little of it ends up in the oceans directly, though.
According to Gapminder, just under 6% of all plastic waste makes it to the sea. Most of it – around 80 million tonnes – is mismanaged: dumped, burned, or buried in ways that still wreak havoc on ecosystems and human health. As Cousteau pointed out, the average person, astonishingly, is believed to carry around the equivalent of a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastics in their body. Including in their brain.
Image created on Midjourney
It’s a bleak picture – and one with eerie echoes in the current hype cycle around AI.
Bakelite was hailed as a wonder material. It made things cheaper, lighter, more efficient. So too does AI. We marvel at what generative tools can do – composing music, designing logos, writing code, diagnosing diseases. Already there are brilliant use cases – and undoubtedly more to come. But are we, once again, rushing headlong into a future we don’t fully understand? Are we about to repeat the same mistake: embracing innovation, while mismanaging its consequences?
Take energy consumption. This last week, OpenAI’s servers were reportedly “melting” under the strain of demand after the launch of their new image-generation model. Melting. It’s not just a metaphor. The environmental cost of training and running large AI models is immense – with a 2019 estimate (ie before the explosion of ChatGPT) suggesting a single model can emit as much carbon as five cars over their entire lifetimes. That’s not a sustainable trajectory.
And yet, much like Bakelite before it, AI is being pushed into every corner of our lives. Often with the best of intentions. But intentions, as the old saying goes, are not enough. What matters is management.
On our plastics panel, Cousteau made the case for upstream thinking. Rather than just reacting to waste, we must design it out of the system from the start. That means rethinking materials, packaging, infrastructure. In other words, it requires foresight. A willingness to zoom out, to consider long-term impacts rather than just short-term gains.
AI demands the same. We need to build governance, ethics, and accountability into its architecture now – before it becomes too entrenched, too ubiquitous, too powerful to regulate meaningfully. Otherwise, we risk creating a different kind of pollution: not plastic, but algorithmic. Invisible yet insidious. Microbiases instead of microplastics. Systemic discrimination baked into decision-making processes. A digital world that serves the few at the expense of the many.
All of this brings us back to leadership. Because the real challenge isn’t innovation. It’s stewardship. As Cousteau reminded us, humans are phenomenally good at solving problems when we decide to care. The tragedy is that we so often wait until it’s too late – until the oceans are full, until the servers melt, until the damage is done.
Moderating that session reminded me just how interconnected these conversations are. Climate. Technology. Health. Equity. We can’t afford to silo them anymore. The story of Bakelite is not just the story of plastics. It’s the story of unintended consequences. The story of how something miraculous became monstrous – not because it was inherently evil, but because we weren’t paying attention.
And that, in the end, is what AI forces us to confront. Are we paying attention? Are we asking the right questions, at the right time, with the right people in the room?
Or are we simply marvelling at the magic – and leaving someone else to clean up the mess?
Statistics of the month
📊 AI in a bubble? Asana’s latest research reveals that AI adoption is stuck in a ‘leadership bubble’ – while executives embrace the tech, most employees remain on the sidelines. Two years in, 67% of companies still haven’t scaled AI across their organisations. 🔗
🤝 Collaboration drives adoption. According to the same study, workers are 46% more likely to adopt AI when a cross-functional partner is already using it. Yet most current implementations are built for solo use – missing the chance to unlock AI’s full, collective potential. 🔗
📉 Productivity gap alert. Gartner predicts that by 2028, over 20% of workplace apps will use AI personalisation to adapt to individual workers. Yet today, only 23% of digital workers are fully satisfied with their tools – and satisfied users are nearly 3x more productive. The workplace tech revolution can’t come soon enough.
📱 Emoji wars at work. New research from The Adaptavist Group exposes a generational rift in office comms: 45% of UK over-50s say emojis are inappropriate, while two-thirds of Gen Z use them daily. Meanwhile, full-stops are deemed ‘professional’ by older workers, but 23% of Gen Z perceive them as ‘rude’. Bring on the AI translators! 🔗
😓 Motivation is fading. Culture Amp finds that UK and EMEA employee motivation has declined for three straight years. Recognition is at a five-year low, and fewer workers feel performance reviews reflect their impact. Hard work, unnoticed. 🔗
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Oliver Pickup 