There are conversations you know you need to have and others you’ve been putting off for months. -A disagreement with a senior colleague that never quite gets resolved. -A committee member who keeps challenging your decisions. -Two departments that have stopped listening to each other. -A business relationship that’s deteriorating, despite everyone’s best efforts to remain professional. -And sometimes, a conversation where the other person holds considerably more power than y

Most of us imagine leaders need to constantly motivate. Sometimes they have to do damage control. A difficult speech is not judged only by whether it is correct. It is judged by whether it helps people understand what happens next. Emmanuel Macron’s address following the violence of 17 October offers an urgent case in speaking under pressure. Not because it was perfect or disastrous, but because it shows how hard damage control really is. I also live in France, but the implic

Recently, I watched a demonstration of Griffin, a new AI model from a company called Tavus. It was extraordinary yet unsettling. A convincing human face, natural conversation, expressions, interruptions. The sort of thing that would have been science fiction only a few years ago. Some reactions were predictably alarmed. Technology this convincing should be banned said one guy on X, another even suggested the creators of Tavus should be sued already. I understand the fear. I d

If an AI company refuses to remove safeguards against mass surveillance and autonomous killing, should that refusal make it a national-security risk? A couple of weeks ago, a US appeals court upheld the Pentagon's decision to exclude Anthropic, the company behind Claude, from defence contracts. Anthropic had refused to remove restrictions on the use of its technology for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon wanted the freedom to use Claude for

Over the years, I’ve watched some very good leaders do something remarkably unsophisticated. They walk over to a paperboard and pick up a pen. They draw boxes. Arrows. Circles. Cross things out. Usually, none of it is particularly beautiful. But something changes in the meeting. People start pointing at the same things. They question the same assumptions. Someone moves an arrow. Someone else adds something that was missing. Eventually, they’re no longer discussing five differ

A friend of mine in Kuwait messaged me on LinkedIn this morning to wish Vortolo a happy first anniversary. Oops, I’d completely forgotten. So I suppose this is where I’m expected to tell you what an incredible unimpeded journey of self-discovery and prosperity it’s been (let’s add a unicorn in there somewhere….🦄). Well it’s been something, some parts of it have been incredible, some parts of it were very difficult. In the first 6 months I ended up in hospital, had few client

Last week, I worked with a senior leader preparing for a final-stage panel interview. She was not looking for reassurance. She wanted direct feedback on a harder question: “What do I intend to communicate, and what do other people actually receive?” In high-stakes communication, our qualities are assessed through the signals our behaviour makes available to the room. We began with a simulation immediately. I wanted to observe her natural baseline. What happened when a questio

People abuse AI. It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But they do. They insult it, threaten it, humiliate it. They give it degrading commands, sexualise it, scream at it when it makes mistakes. Some deliberately try to provoke responses that mimic distress. And this isn’t just anecdotal—there’s research examining user aggression toward conversational AI, from swearing and insults to whether making AI seem more human changes how we treat it. We could shrug this off. After all, ChatGP

Imagine being a leader in 1968. War. Political assassinations. Civil unrest. Soviet tanks entering Czechoslovakia. Established institutions under pressure. A widening generational divide. Populations deeply divided over what should happen next. The Vietnam War was eroding public trust. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy intensified an already fractured political climate. Protest and unrest filled streets from Paris to Chicago. Television brought m

We live in the age of powerful frontier AI. And yet… This week, the task was simple: upload one document to the France Travail website. One document. Here is ChatGPT’s observation after the attempt. May I add, it is the only time I’ve ever heard ChatGPT utter the ‘F’ word. Here’s what it told me: ▌ CHATGPT │ ARC-AGI: abstract reasoning. │ │ Humanity’s Last Exam: expert-level knowledge (a benchmark designed to test AI on extremely difficult questions across multiple academic d

My partner was eight years old when she met him. It was the early 1980s in rural Czechoslovakia, at a holiday resort where workers and their families spent state-funded vacations. She already knew who he was. To her, he wasn’t just the bartender. He was the fascinating old man behind the bar who somehow transformed ordinary ingredients into something magical. One day she picked fresh raspberries and brought them to him. He smiled. “Come back later.” When she returned, he hadn

This weekend, the sudden death of a prominent U.S. senator sparked intense speculation. I'm not interested in adding another theory. Whoever is reading this will no doubt have their own. I'm interested in what moments like this reveal about leadership communication. Whatever the facts ultimately prove to be, situations like these place leaders in an extraordinarily difficult position. On a political level, this is about as heated as it gets. Information is incomplete. Emotion

For the past six months I’ve been consistently experimenting with local AI models. Pretty much every week night. Not because I wanted to replace ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Quite the opposite. It started with curiosity, more a compulsion. Could an independent consultant, without a research lab or a huge budget, build something genuinely useful with local AI? The answer turned out to be yes. But It hasn’t been glamorous. Still isn’t. I started on my MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM ba

I've just started reading Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. It's a book about the randomness of decision-making. About how outcomes and decisions are not the same thing. How even the best call, made with the best available information at the time, can crash and burn. It's a refreshing read. And it got me thinking about leadership. I've been writing recently about how leaders are expected to project certainty. That the job, in many people's minds, still requires absolute convict

For most of my career, executives were trained to do one thing on a stage: convince the room that everything was under control. Stand up. Project confidence. State the plan. Make the uncertainty disappear. I coached that for years. I was good at it. I was also, I now think, training people to send the wrong signal, but that was the culture of the moment. And a very different context compared to today. I've watched leaders lay out exactly what the next twelve, twenty-four, thi

This week I took five minutes to listen to Keir Starmer's resignation speech. On a personal level, I found it a little disappointing to see him go. Whether you agreed with his politics or not, I believed him when he spoke about caring for the country and wanting to improve people's lives. But as someone who coaches leaders for a living, I found myself watching something else. The delivery. The speech was carefully written, measured, and safe. It was also heavily dependent on

For nine years, I have attended VivaTech helping other people have important conversations. Last year I managed one of my own. Since its conception, I've attended VivaTech in various capacities. Host. Moderator. Coach. Facilitator. Nine years. Almost all of it centred around the Discovery Stage. My role was always the same: help other people shine. This year, for the first time, I'm attending as the founder of Vortolo. No stage to manage.No panel to moderate.No event to host.

One thing that strikes me whenever a major crisis emerges is how much attention we give to political leaders. And how little attention we give to the people making hundreds of operational decisions behind the scenes. Take any major disruption. A geopolitical conflict. A supply chain shock.A sudden increase in energy prices.Tariffs. Climate events. AI disruption. The headlines focus on governments. But the real test often happens elsewhere. Inside companies. In operations team

Most people think communication problems are caused by saying too little. In my experience, the opposite is often true. Many organisations don't suffer from under-communication. They suffer from over-communication. When uncertainty rises, leaders instinctively add more: More context. More nuance. More explanation. More updates. More slides. Take the current uncertainty surrounding the Strait of Hormuz. For many organisations, it raises legitimate questions around logistics,

Most founder pitches tell chronology instead of operating philosophy. “We started here.” “Then we built this.” “Then we raised this.” The problem is that investors are rarely trying to reconstruct your biography. They’re trying to understand how you think under changing conditions. I worked last week on a pitch where this became very clear. At first, the deck followed a familiar structure: history, milestones, expansion, growth. Sure, it was Informative, impressive and profes