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

The safest decision is often the most dangerous one. Most professionals believe caution reduces risk. So do most organisations. But the truth is excessive caution often creates a different kind of risk entirely: strategic drift. I’m seeing more leadership teams delay decisions not because they lack intelligence, competence, or data, but because modern organisations have trained leaders to optimise for consensus over conviction. Nobody wants to be the person attached to a fail

Nearly one year after starting Vortolo, I’ve found myself reflecting on where this adventure really began. The name itself didn’t originate from me. It came from my great-uncle, Frank Rickwood, who used “Vortolo” years ago here in Barbados as the name for a holding company he established while living on the island. At the time, he was being practical. His company allowed him to purchase property and to operate locally, as many expatriates did here. But behind his corporate se

There are moments when a speech isn’t just designed to land in the space it occupies. Sometimes It’s designed to travel. King Charles’s address to Congress is one of those moments. On the surface, it was a skilful resetting of priorities. A reaffirmation of alliance, democratic values, and shared responsibility in a volatile world. But in the US capitol, the atmosphere was tense. Not hostile, but not fully aligned either. The king appeared to be heartily welcomed by all. Let’

“Claude has emotions, and cheats when it feels desperate. The new model (Mythos) is so risky they’ve shut it down.” That’s what people are saying this week. It’s not really true. Let’s wind it back a bit. Claude doesn’t have emotions like humans do. What scientists are seeing are patterns inside the AI that look like things such as being careful, unsure, or trying harder when it keeps failing. But it shouldn’t be ignored either. Because something important is changing. These

I’m always paying attention to where communication breaks under pressure. It’s an acutely uncomfortable scenario. A workshop facilitator was recently challenged on an inconsistency between what she was showing and what she was saying. She couldn’t explain it. The session collapsed. Someone then told his entire network on X about the whole thing. She didn’t own her material. And that is a problem we’re seeing more and more of. I’ve started using AI more and more as a pitch p

Around us, something is shifting. Not collapse. But erosion. Public messages that were once reassuring are losing credibility as the context moves faster than the narrative. Leaders are repeating positions that no longer quite match reality. Organisations are moving carefully, delaying commitments. A kind of institutional freeze is setting in. Inside companies, the effect is tangible. Not chaos… but pressure. There is a heavy weight. Decisions delayed. Teams misaligned. Peopl

Recently I’ve been noticing something in my LinkedIn and X feeds. A steady stream of posts about collapse, disruption, uncertainty. The end of jobs, industries, and entire ways of working. AI confusion, wars, and scarcity. Morning coffee has never been so downbeat. ☕ Some of it reflects real changes in the world. I get that. We are living through a period of genuine transformation, and with that comes fear of the unknown. But the tone often feels different in a lot of these p

Many professionals still believe credibility comes from explaining more. More context More background. More slides. More words. I’ve seen this pattern again and again in meeting rooms throughout my career. We all know it kills our audiences but sometimes company culture or fear can override this. Over the years, I’ve sat in on meetings in large institutions, including UN organisations, where the material was prepared for senior leaders, yet was so dense it struggled to separ

I live in Europe. Most of the AI tools I use every day come from the United States. They’re powerful. Fast. Incredibly useful. But something is becoming clearer. If you work with sensitive information—client strategy, internal discussions, early-stage ideas, confidential documents—at some point, you start asking a different question. Not “How good is the model?” But “Where is my data actually going?” For many use cases, cloud AI is perfectly fine. But for others, especially i

I’ve lived with impostor syndrome for most of my career. And to be honest, I still work on it. It was particularly acute at the beginning of my career. I could sit through a client meeting with a colleague and not utter a word. When I came back more confidently some years later, people struggled to remember me from those early days. Impostor syndrome isn’t just “doubting yourself.” It’s a pattern of self-interference. It shows up as invisible rules you impose on yourself: ∙ D