When the world won't slow down, clarity becomes your edge. Discover insights on AI, geopolitical risk, and workplace design from Workday Elevate Leaders Forum.
Jo-Anne Ruhl
Vice President and Managing Director
Workday ANZ
If there was one moment that captured the mood at the Workday Elevate Leaders Forum, it was this: a room of leaders quietly nodding as someone finally named what they had been feeling.
The world feels loud right now – and not in a good way.
Between the rapid evolution of AI, shifting macroeconomic pressures, and an increasingly fractured geopolitical order, it is genuinely difficult to know where to focus.
As leaders, our job is not to block out the noise entirely, but to find the signal, gain clarity, and give our boards, teams and markets the confidence to move forward.
Here are the key insights from our speakers at the event, which brought this into focus.
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Damien Bruckard, Co-Founder and Head of Advisory at Geopolitical Strategy, noted that leaders today have one job: not to predict the future, but to position for it.
His survey of 350 CEOs in Australia found that 100% were more concerned about geopolitical risk than six months earlier, and 78% were much more concerned.
Yet, only 7% of firms reported structural changes in response to geopolitical uncertainty. That execution gap is where leadership earns its keep.
To help leaders take action, Damien encouraged us all to move deliberately between two vantage points – a big-picture view and granular, crisis-level detail.
Use scenario planning (not forecasting) to map multiple plausible futures and their impact on your firm.
This allows us to become 'historians of the present' with a balanced perspective. His 5Ms Risk Framework gives a practical structure for doing exactly that:
Model: The assumption of a stable, rules-based global trade order is no longer reliable. Trade has become weaponised. Use scenario planning (not forecasting) to map multiple plausible futures and their impact on your firm.
Map: Identify where your state-driven vulnerabilities actually sit. Think about the taps governments can turn on and off: your people flows, data sovereignty, legal exposure, and supply chain choke points – not just physical infrastructure. Your board will increasingly expect this discipline to sit alongside every other category of enterprise risk.
Measure: Use historical frequency to guide probability estimates, and think in orders of magnitude for impact. Is a given risk trivial, serious or existential? The aggregate of multiple people's estimates will outperform any single forecast. Remember: what does not get measured does not get managed.
Monitor: Work backwards from each identified risk to find two or three verifiable leading indicators. These become your early-warning system and make the daily noise far more easy to navigate.
Manage: Divide your response into no-regret actions (diversification and redundancy measures that make sense regardless of which scenario materialises) and contingent actions (triggered only when specific thresholds are crossed).
Professor Peter Weill from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research spoke about a topic that I know is keeping many leaders up at night. How do we create value in the AI era?
Creating value is now about delivering outcomes on behalf of the customer, not just helping them reach those outcomes themselves.
In the digital era, there were two predictors of performance: better understanding your end customers; and changing from a value chain to an ecosystem model.
But agentic AI is forcing a structural shift. Creating value is now about delivering outcomes on behalf of the customer, not just helping them reach those outcomes themselves.
Peter gave some excellent examples of organisations already adapting their business model to the AI era.
One example was Amazon's 'Buy for Me' product, which helps customers discover and purchase products from other brands' sites if those items are not sold in Amazon's store.
The challenge Peter put to the room was this: what is your equivalent of this capability? What models might come and disrupt your business, and what are you going to do about it?
He mapped four value-creation pathways as a prediction for where he sees the future of the AI economy:
Peter noted that the best place to start is likely going to be the business model you're most comfortable with, but know that it may not offer the most value.
We cannot have an honest conversation about technology without an equally honest conversation about the people it is meant to serve.
Organisational psychologist Dr Kat Page made the stakes clear: the way we design and lead work is one of the most significant public health interventions available to any leader.
The right question is not 'how do we make people more productive? It is: what work should humans no longer be carrying in the first place?
An ANU longitudinal study tracking 7,000 Australian workers over seven years found that working in a poorly designed, high-strain job is now worse for mental health than being unemployed.
Employment is not the goal. Good work is the goal.
Her warning about AI was precise: used carelessly, it creates an infinite workday – employees trapped in loops of automated execution, never quite finished, never quite in control.
The right question is not 'how do we make people more productive? It is: what work should humans no longer be carrying in the first place?
Kat distilled the conditions for workplace mental health into a formula that I loved for it's simplicity and power:
Love + [Load / Latitude] x Leadership
Love: People do not just want manageable work. They want meaningful, motivating work. As the saying goes: If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do.
Load over Latitude: High workload is not what breaks people. What causes psychological injury is heavy load paired with low latitude.
No autonomy, no control. As Kat put it: "Humans don't break from hard work. They break down from helplessness."
Professor Sir Michael Marmot's research at UCL confirms it: the worst health outcomes belong not to those with the most pressure, but to those with the least control.
Leadership: Leaders are workplace designers. Our behaviour amplifies everything in the system.
Getting this right requires both clarity of expectations and genuine care – and the right balance looks different for every person you lead.
If you ask your leadership team one question, let it be this: do we have a common language for the challenges we are facing?
Peter Baines OAM, a former NSW Police Commander who led international forensic teams in Thailand after the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, closed the forum with grounding clarity.
When Australian teams arrived in Thailand, they assumed leadership of the international response.
Peter traced it to four things: speed of action, leading change with sensitivity, operating from simple structures rather than over-engineered policy, and the acceptance that an imperfect decision made quickly beats no decision at all.
His most resonant idea was about presence and purpose.
You do not need every answer. What your teams need is to see that you understand their reality, that your words align with your actions, and that you are willing to be visible when it is uncomfortable.
Connected to that is clarity about your non-negotiables: know what matters most to you as a leader, and decision-making in complex conditions becomes significantly easier.
My biggest takeaway from the event is that great leadership in this era is not about predicting the future.
It is about deliberately designing your organisation – its architecture, risk posture, roles, and culture – to handle volatility when it arrives.
The noise is not going away. But if you ask your leadership team one question, let it be this: do we have a common language for the challenges we are facing?
The conversation it generates is where you'll find the alignment you need to move forward.
As Peter Baines beautifully reminded us, leaders bring the weather. The world outside might be stormy and unpredictable, but the climate inside your organisation is entirely up to you.
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