CEOS ARE NO LONGER TRUSTED… A GUIDE TO REINVENTION: PART 2

I have recently had the pleasure of talking to @Caroline Stokes, executive coach and author of Aftershock to 2030: A CEO’s Guide to Reinvention in the Age of AI, Climate and Societal Collapse. It was a great discussion, covering her insights into how the C-Suite needs to adapt. I’m delighted to share the second part of the interview here, where she talks about the challenges of AI, ‘whole-brain leadership’, how leaders can tackle a feeling of overwhelm, and how they can stay effective to 2030 and beyond…

You talk about ‘whole-brain leadership.’ For someone who’s never heard that term, what does it mean – and how can it help leaders do their jobs better?

Whole-brain leadership means leading with the full spectrum of your cognitive and emotional capacities – not just the rational, analytical skills we’ve historically rewarded in business.

For decades, leadership has leaned heavily on logic, control, efficiency, and structure. But today’s challenges – climate disruption, AI upheaval, employee disillusionment, and moral complexity – can’t be solved with spreadsheets, governance, and an employee resource group alone.

Whole-brain leadership brings together critical thinking, emotional intelligence, intuition, creativity, and systems awareness. It’s not soft. It’s strategic range – the ability to read the room, sense emerging dynamics, and respond with clarity in uncertain conditions.

And now, there's a new imperative: integrating with AI. Whole-brain leaders must learn to thought-partner with AI tools – not just to automate tasks, but to synthesise complex data, uncover signal through noise, and pressure-test decisions. It’s about co-designing insight, refining direction, and implementing change at speed – while staying grounded in human judgment and ethics.

In a world where leaders must navigate economic strain, technological disruption, cultural shifts, and existential risk simultaneously, you need the ability to toggle between modes: from analysis to intuition, urgency to reflection, technical fluency to emotional depth.

Many leaders I work with realise they’ve been over-indexing on their ‘business brain’, while starving the part that connects to people, purpose, and possibility. Whole-brain leadership restores that balance. It builds trust faster, unlocks innovation, and helps teams move with coherence – even when the future is volatile and undefined.

And now, with Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill effectively removing the speed limits on AI development, roll-out and adoption, we’ve entered a no-speed-restriction motorway of transformation that’s going to create an even faster global gold rush. That makes it non-negotiable: leaders must become strategic, emotional, inflectional, relational, systemically aware, and AI literate – within themselves and across their teams.

I warned about this back in 2019 during my TEDx Brooklyn talk – you can still find it on the TED website. The future is right here, right now.

You say many leaders feel stuck or overwhelmed right now. What simple steps from your book can help them move forward with more confidence?

This overwhelm isn’t new and feeling stuck is a predictable human response.

Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock warned us about the psychological toll of accelerating change – a kind of cultural disorientation driven by technology and speed. Decades later, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine in 2007 exposed how crises have been exploited to fracture societies and entrench inequality. AfterShock offers the leadership response: a call for conscience, coherence, and a systems-based approach to reinvention in the face of compounding disruption augmented with ethical AI system, not dominated by it.

You believe that what worked for leaders in the past won’t work in the future. What’s one habit or mindset leaders need to let go of – and what should they replace it with?

They need to let go of the idea that someone else is going to save them.

As I wrote in World’s Best Coaches for Wiley during the pandemic: the cavalry is not coming. You can’t wait for HR to fix it, for the board to give permission, or for just one person to lead the vision when there’s so many challenges geopolitics, climate, economics, society – to tackle. We all know we’ve gone beyond that, don’t we?

The new mindset is radical accountability starting with oneself and extending through your team and organisation.

We each have to evolve in real time just like a LiveOps system – but for the mind. That means choosing to continuously update how we perceive, decide, relate and lead.

It means taking ownership of your emotional regulation, your decision-making patterns, your blind spots, and the development of the organisation’s cultural blueprint.

This isn’t about ego when many leaders feel they “don’t need a coaching system” to solve the problems; it’s about agency. The leaders who thrive in the next decade will be the ones who stop asking: “Why isn’t someone doing something?” – and start asking, “What am I uniquely positioned to shift right now?”

The sooner you replace the old mindset, the sooner you start feeling a sense of clarity and feeling like you’re leading more confidently.

You help leaders rethink their personal and company ‘stories.’ Why does that matter – and how can a new story help a leader stay effective through 2030?

Most leaders today are running on outdated, limiting stories: “I can’t.” “It’s too complex.” “AI is terrible.” “Climate change isn’t my responsibility.” “I don’t know where to start.”

“Society is doomed”

Those stories might feel true in the moment – but they keep leaders stuck. And stuck is dangerous when the ground is shape-shifting faster than we can grasp.

In Q1 of 2025 alone, 646 CEOs stepped down, which is the highest ever recorded. According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, CEO trust is at a crisis point. This isn’t just a leadership issue, it’s a narrative breakdown that leaders have refused to accept and adapt to. People no longer believe the old script – social media reflects that back to us. And many leaders don’t know how to create the new vision and bridge the gap.

That’s why rethinking your personal and company story isn’t just a nice exercise – it’s the work. The story you tell yourself determines how you show up in meetings, how you lead through volatility, how you respond to uncertainty, and how others follow you. If your story hasn’t evolved, your leadership can’t either.

Every leader is now in a reinvention arc. Whether they like it or not, they’re in the messy middle of a trilogy. They’re not in the origin story anymore. And they haven’t reached the final chapter. They’re right in the hard, uncomfortable second act. That’s where the reckoning happens.

The good news? You get to start over. You get a blank slate. You get to own what’s been true, what no longer serves, and what the future needs from you now.

A new story doesn’t mean abandoning everything. It means evolving the narrative so you can lead in a way that’s aligned, conscious, and fit for the next era.

Because the leaders who make it through 2030 will not be the ones clinging to the past. They’ll be the ones brave enough to rewrite their story in real time.

Do you have a real-world example of a leader who made a big shift and came out stronger on the other side? What can others learn from that?

Most of the leaders I work with are undergoing complete internal rewiring. And the speed at which they do it – especially when they work with me and an AI co-pilot – is extraordinary. What used to take years of incremental change now happens in months.

One senior leader I worked with came in feeling completely depleted – stuck in old thinking, disconnected from his team, struggling to lead with all the changes around him. Within three months, we’d mapped his leadership triggers, rewired his narrative, and built a new communication model grounded in clarity, confidence, and adaptability. The turning point came when team coaching aligned with this leadership transformation. It can’t just be one single leader that receives the coaching, it needs to be the team to multiply the change.

That kind of transformation is the backbone of AfterShock to 2030.

Caroline’s book is available now here - https://shorturl.at/urkIV

What are your thoughts? What are the key challenges facing the C-Suite, and how should it adapt?