From Oxford to the edge of tomorrow: Leo Johnson on leading through disruption, megatrends & meaningful change

Now regarded as one of the UK’s most influential futurism speakers, Leo brings a rare combination of economic analysis, environmental insight, and behavioural science to global conversations about disruption.

As co-presenter of BBC Radio 4’s FutureProofing and a former World Bank economist, he’s uniquely positioned to decode the signals shaping business and society—from climate risk to AI convergence.

In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Leo explores the megatrends redefining leadership, why inaction is often dressed as progress, and how truly transformational teams can unlock inclusive growth.

Drawing on cutting-edge research and years of advising senior leaders, he outlines what it takes to navigate volatility—and why the future must be actively shaped, not passively endured.

Q: From your vantage point studying future trends, what emerging signals or megatrends do you believe will most significantly reshape business and society in the coming years?

Leo Johnson: “If you look out at what's coming ahead—smooth waters or choppy—we've clearly put a huge amount of, you know, stuff back in the box: Brexit, the energy crisis, COVID. But you could argue there's some choppy waters ahead.

“When I was doing the Future Proofing programme, we got in the habit of looking at these weak signals on the future. Just throwing out a couple—if you look at the price of woolly mammoth tusks, going up or down? Answer: it's cratering.

“Why? Because warming is just melting the ice. And this is not about woolly mammoth tusks, this is about methane—424 gigatons of methane just below Lake Baikal in Siberia alone.

“You've got, clearly, generative AI—technology that's accelerating at 180,000 times the speed of the human brain that's taken 360,000 years to double. You've got this convergence of megatrends, these collisions of technologies that are accelerating and converging, and there's no question that there's going to be some disruption.

“But there's a great quote from my favourite political thinker, Marilyn Monroe, who says, "Sometimes good things fall apart so that better things can fall into place."

“What's also clear is that we're at this extraordinary delta where there's not just a downside that's unprecedented—there's also the potential to take in the arsenal of technology we've got and to inflect it to address the huge amount of challenges we've got and to turn them into vast opportunities that raise the living standards, that create new growth markets—education, housing—across the batches of challenges we've got.

“And, to my mind, unlock a wave of growth that could be way better, way more inclusive, way richer, way more fun than what we've got at the moment.”

Q: For leaders trying to effect meaningful change, what are the most critical institutional and psychological barriers they must navigate—and how can they overcome them?

Leo Johnson: “So, what are the key challenges if you're a leader and you really want to drive change? I would throw out two, in fact. The first is: been in an organisation where it really is on the receiving end of a change. What's it felt like? Answer: probably pretty bad.

“Organisations are really good at knowing how to resist, and it's a vital skill—otherwise you're going to be in a permanent state of transformation. So you're going to encounter this state of institutional threat rigidity, right?

“When an organisation needs to change, it's going to be a little bit frozen in the headlights. And you're coming at it with this change plan, and the answer is: they're going to look at you like you're rocking the lifeboat they're clinging to.

“And you're going to see all the threat rigidities that organisations come getting amplified. You're going to see centralisation. You're going to see innovation budgets getting cut. You're going to see the dissenting voices getting marginalised.

“You're going to see elbows getting really sharp and psychological safety dropping down. All the mechanisms that organisations, in fact, need to nurture the innovation suddenly become really fragile.

“But the second thing that you're going to encounter—and this is what we're researching with the Oxford project that I'm leading with the Smith School at Oxford—you're going to see that there's individual stress responses that get really complex.

“And where there'll be a bunch of members of your teams and your management and even you yourself, where you'll deal with the pressure of stress and stress of change and the dissonance it creates and the logic conflict between the demands of the boss, the demands of this climate initiative, and the demands of your own job and keeping the show on the road—that your colleagues will be dealing with that conflict by coming up with what the psychologists call motivated cognition.

“Which is essentially a set of kind of jiu-jitsu moves that we all of us make in the brain to justify inaction. And if you think about this in very concrete terms, you'll see that if you take climate change or a tech transformation, you'll hear these voices out there who might be the sceptic who say, "Yeah, does it really work?"

“It might be the techno solutionist on climate—"I don't need to do anything because Elon Musk is going to sort it out." It might be the catastrophist who says, "That change programme is never going to work anyway," or, "Climate change is so far gone there's nothing we can do."

“So we come up with this extraordinary set of manoeuvres which justify our inaction or, even worse, the performative action. It gives you the illusion of change that just ticks the change box but leaves you actually pointing in exactly the same direction.”

Q: In your view, what truly defines transformational leadership in today’s climate of disruption, and how can leaders distinguish themselves from those simply maintaining the status quo?

Leo Johnson: “So how do you define the really transformational leader? I mean, let me try giving you a really clunky metaphor. Let's say we're all in a big old bus, and that bus—it's kind of headed towards what looks possibly like, in the worst cases, a bit of a cliff face. Maybe multiple cliff faces. And it might be inequality, it might be climate—you name it—it might be geopolitical issues.

“And I think you've got three options for leaders, and there's only one of them that's a real problem. What's the first option? The leader gets behind the wheel of the bus, there's the cliff, and they announce to the passengers, "Folks, guess what? I've got some good news for you—we're heading over the cliff and I want to take you there." Not a problem. Just a lousy manager, because they're going to get sacked. The passengers on the bus are going to rise up and say, "Get out of that seat!"

“Then you've got a second leader who gets behind the wheel and turns—manages to take us onto not the X or Y axis, but the Z axis, and really delivers change. They're clearly not the problem.

“There’s a third leader, though, which is—I suspect—the leader we're all trained to be. Which is the leader that gets behind that wheel and optimises and realises there's a real conflict, because the sat-nav has got "over the cliff" plugged into the destination. And that's where the grooves are on the road, and that's where the wheels are naturally turning. And it's pretty damn hard and career-risky to manoeuvre that change.

“So what that leader does is they actually keep their hands locked in the same direction on the wheel, but they indicate left. And they say, "Yeah, we'll be turning left by 2050, that's our plan." And they make some announcements over the tannoy of the bus saying, "Keep calm, folks, it's going to be fine, we're turning left." And that's the leader that I think is the real issue—the sustaining leader.

“And the transformative leader is the one who actually manages to identify the megatrends that drive the need for change, that informs themselves of that transformative intent, and then creates the collective agency and forms the mission-based team that manages as a group—as a collective team—because there is no transformative leader. There is only a transformative team to drive the change.”

This exclusive interview with Leo Johnson was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.

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