During Pilotlight's recent webinar From potential to performance: What leaders need in uncertain times, I spent most of the time listening, which is what good moderating asks of you. Three senior people leaders, Louise Williams at PepsiCo, Ruth Mullin at BPP Education Group and Raelene Kaminski at asset managers Wellington Management, kept arriving at the same place without having compared notes. Leadership is shifting from having answers to exercising judgment when there aren't any.
It's a view I share, and it left me with a question I've been turning over since. If judgment is built through experience, where do leaders get the right kind of experience, and what makes it last once they're back at their desks?
Louise described the work PepsiCo is doing with its extended leadership team on technical and adaptive leadership. Technical leadership applies known expertise: decide, instruct, escalate. Adaptive leadership asks questions, experiments, and stays with not knowing long enough to learn something.
The point that stayed with me is about timing. Under pressure, leaders default to the technical mode because it feels safe. Yet pressure is exactly when the adaptive approach matters most.
The capability organisations need most is often the one most likely to disappear at the moment it's needed.
AI sharpens this. Raelene observed that knowing the answer is becoming less valuable for leaders, while making a sound call without one is becoming more so. The leaders who stand out will be the ones who ask better questions and test their assumptions.
Everyone on the panel agreed that this kind of capability can't be built in a classroom alone. Ruth described BPP using AI simulations in its management training, ending its executive programme with action learning sets and adding coaching circles to every management programme.
Louise's team protects weekly "noodle time" to look at problems from a different angle, a phrase that is now spreading well beyond her own function.
Raelene was precise about why it works. Experience is only the first step. Leaders need to reflect on what happened, and then deliberately take what they learned back into their day jobs.
Raelene shared an example from Wellington's work with Pilotlight. One of their leaders was supporting a charity on a challenge that was unfamiliar and genuinely ambiguous. Instead of arriving with one fully worked-out solution, which was his habit at work, he brought the charity's team several options and explored them together.
He told her afterwards that he'd never have worked that way with his own manager. He'd always felt he had to bring a polished answer. Now he does the opposite: he takes options to his manager early, they agree a direction, and he develops it from there. Decisions move faster, and his manager can see his thinking as it forms.
That is the shift Louise described, happening in practice.
At Pilotlight, business leaders work alongside charity leaders on real strategic challenges. I often say that purpose activates learning, and the charity setting is where that happens. Unfamiliar territory strips away the expertise people usually lean on. The stakes are real, so the judgment has to be real. And because the impact for the charity matters, people take it seriously in a way no simulation can fully replicate.
Louise completed a Pilotlight programme this year. She described stepping well beyond her people remit, into the shoes of a CFO or CEO, and pushing a charity leader to think longer-term about where he wanted to take the organisation.
What she valued most was the structured reflection built in at regular points: the step Raelene identified as the one that turns experience into capability.
Ruth used a phrase I keep coming back to: the leader's shadow. It's the effect leaders have through what they model, especially under pressure, and what carries on once they've left the room. Culture, as Ruth put it, is the output of behaviour rather than something that can simply be announced.
Louise gave a good example. A senior leader at PepsiCo held back from making decisions for an up-and-coming sales leader. He put her in front of a customer without him, then coached her afterwards. When he described this to his peers, he gave them permission to try the same.
People notice what works for a peer, borrow it and try it on for themselves. That's how one leader's shadow starts to shape others.
This is the part I keep thinking about. Most leadership development is designed around the individual. But judgment that stays in one person's head doesn't change an organisation. In my experience, three conditions decide whether it spreads:
It also changes what we measure. Louise suggested that adaptive leadership should show up as decisions that take a little longer but are reversed less often, and as people further down the organisation feeling trusted to decide. Ruth pointed to retention, internal mobility and the health of succession pipelines. Both tell you far more than a satisfaction score: they show whether capability has moved from individuals into the organisation.
Experiential learning works because it places people in situations where they have to exercise judgment, not simply demonstrate knowledge. Whether that learning lasts depends on what happens when they bring it back into the organisation. That second half is where I think the most interesting work in leadership development now sits. We'll be talking about it for a while.
My gratitude to Louise, Ruth and Raelene for such an honest and generous conversation.
If you're thinking about how to build judgment in your leaders through real challenges with real stakes, we'd love to continue the conversation. Get in touch with the Pilotlight team.