18 Jan 2026
Ep. 21: Davos week: Multiple futures, and rethinking leadership with Gil Forer
In this special episode timed for the World Economic Forum annual meeting, Caroline Stokes sits down with Gil Forer, a contractor and former senior partner with EY, to explore our new leadership reality and why leaders must act now—deploy, adopt, adapt, and learn publicly—because the gap will widen if they wait.
They discuss why the past five years have supercharged change and introduce “NAVI”, our nonlinear, accelerated, volatile, and interconnected world. Gil and Caroline also explore why many traditional leadership tools (strategy, risk, governance, transformation roadmaps) are now not fit for purpose.
They tackle the shift from VUCA to VUCA+/NAVI, why there’s no single future (only “futures”), and what it means to lead toward a superfluid enterprise—less hierarchy, more networked orchestration, and an entirely new relationship between humans, AI agents, and cognition.
If you’re a CEO, senior leader, board member, or strategist trying to navigate AI, geopolitical instability, climate volatility, and compressed reinvention, this episode will give you language, frameworks, and a clear urgency. You can’t sit on the sidelines in 2026.
In this episode:
The new nature of change: why disruption isn’t new, but post-pandemic change is different—nonlinear, accelerated, volatile, interconnected.
Not fit for purpose: why many legacy approaches no longer match reality.
Rethink the foundations: why “rethink” isn’t a weekend exercise but deep cognitive work to rewrite long-held assumptions.
No-regret moves: what leaders can do now that they won’t regret later, especially around resilience, agility, and operating flexibility.
VUCA+/NAVI: why VUCA isn’t “gone”, but it’s incomplete; how NAVI better reflects today’s conditions, and why mindset updates matter.
“Futures” is plural: why there’s no one linear path, and how that changes strategy, foresight, and decision-making.
Importance of systems thinking: why design thinking helps with complicated problems, but systems thinking is essential for complex systems.
Ecosystems as a leadership capability: moving beyond partnerships to orchestration—building fluid, issue-based coalitions in a fast-shifting world.
Trust as hard currency: reframing trust as a strategic asset—invest, measure, and treat it like currency.
Migration as economic infrastructure: why leaders should reframe migration as a strategic asset requiring investment, planning, and community-level thinking.
AI as infrastructure: why AI isn’t just a technology wave—it’s an infrastructure play (compute, energy, data centres) reshaping power and access.
The mic-drop leadership scenario: “What happens if I have 10 people and 50,000 agents?” How leadership, incentives, productivity, and teamwork get rewritten.
Neuroscience & the human-machine era: why understanding cognition and behaviour design matters when we’re augmenting human work at scale.
More about Gil Forer
Gil is an intrapreneur and connector who thrives at the intersection of emerging technology, strategic foresight, and human collaboration. His career has centred on building what’s next: founding global innovation platforms, shaping future-thinking ecosystems, and advising leading organizations and high-growth start-ups on how to anticipate change and unlock new markets.
As a senior partner at EY, he launched and led global businesses that transformed how organizations innovate and scale, including EY wavespace, a network of experience hubs helping companies accelerate meaningful outcomes, and EYQ, a think tank exploring “what’s after what’s next” for CEOs and boards. He created the Innovation Realized Summit, a uniquely immersive and experience-based forum uniting business, government, and academic leaders to shape the future of enterprise. Gil also convened networks of experts and thought leaders to advise on business challenges.
Currently Gil is a part-time contractor with EY where he leads several initiatives around AI, foresight, and start-ups.
