Leading in a world of change: insights from The Talent Gathering 2025

This week, I was lucky enough to attend The Talent Gathering at Murrayfield in Edinburgh. It’s the second time I’ve been and, once again, I left full of ideas. Three talks in particular have stayed with me. Very different speakers, very different stories, but all offering perspectives on how we can adapt, lead, and perform in a world where both human and technological change are accelerating and where we never quite know what’s around the corner. 

John Crossan, Culture Impact COO, at The Talent Gathering 2025.

Amy Brann from Synaptic Potential shared insights from neuroscience that leaders can use in simple, practical ways to shift culture and performance. She spoke about the impact of the cognitive overload that is a common feature of modern working life and the impact of the sense of fragmentation that we experience as a result – we struggle to do the high-value work that we’re actually there to do. She reminded us that performance isn’t just about effort and being busy, driven from task to task, meeting to meeting, by diaries. It’s about context. Change the context, and you change the experience. Change the experience, and you change performance. 

Amy shared powerful, proven examples of how, simply by changing our mindsets, we improve performance (in fact, we can actually change our physiology for the better by shifting our perception – see the 2007 study by Crum and Langer, "Mind-Set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect"). We can help ourselves tremendously with some simple but powerful practices, for example, intentionally designing our environment to make it fit for the task we have at hand, by using visual cues, smells and our senses to shift our mental state. And, critically, by protecting our brain space.  

Mairi McInnes from PwC gave us a longer-range view about the opportunities that AI holds for leaders and organisations. She gave examples of leaders finding opportunities to innovate in through AI, in ways that we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago – car manufacturers exploring ways to monitor drivers’ health through sensors in steering wheels stood out. Mairi put the size of the opportunity centre stage - $7 trillion of ‘value in motion’. Her challenge to talent leaders was to find ways to actively integrate AI skills into role design and talent strategies, or face being left behind.  

She also made it clear that there are leadership and cultural challenges to be stepped up to. Leaders must find ways to build cultures of trust and experimentation that will allow people to really engage with AI with confidence. They need to help colleagues see how AI can accelerate their performance and enable them to deliver even more value: if AI can do 30% of your job, perhaps you can handle even more of what’s left with the same – perhaps less – effort? Perhaps that added value will lead to added reward? There is also a systemic challenge. Micro-adoptions aren’t enough, organisations need to find ways to embed AI enterprise-wide, and they need to start quickly. All of this is likely to require a thorough audit and re-engineering of behaviours, symbols and systems. 

Finally, Darren Edwards left me feeling moved and inspired in equal measure. After sustaining life-changing injuries during a climbing accident, he is a man role-modelling a kind of leadership that is underpinned by authenticity, vulnerability, resilience and courage. He is one of the most striking examples of a leader who exemplifies an ‘above the line’ mindset of high accountability: refusal to waste energy on things beyond our control, making ourselves powerless in the face of our challenges, commitment to taking steps that will bring about the future version of ourselves that we most dearly want to see, and writing our own story - constrained by, but not determined by our past.  

Darren’s next adventure (after kayaking from Lands' End to John o’ Groats and completing seven marathons, in seven days, on seven continents…) is in ten weeks, sit-skiing to the South Pole. There’ll be a daily broadcast by Starlink, I can recommend following him on Instagram @darrenedwards_adventurer.  

I’ll be back at The Talent Gathering next year. If you’re looking for a source of ideas to motivate and inspire new thinking relating to talent, leadership, culture, and life, get yourself a ticket.