For years, the debate around remote work has centred on productivity.

Can people work effectively from home? Does flexibility improve performance? Should companies bring employees back to the office?

Christopher Carter believes those questions overlook something more important.

The chairman and CEO of Approyo built a business that operates across multiple countries and time zones. The model gives him access to talent regardless of geography and allows customers to be supported around the clock. Yet despite embracing hybrid work, Christopher remains convinced that something important is lost when people stop sharing physical space.

The issue is not efficiency. It is visibility.

Building beyond geography

Christopher has spent much of his career around enterprise technology, SAP systems and cloud infrastructure. Today, much of his attention is focused on artificial intelligence, data security and helping organisations understand where AI creates genuine business value.

Like many businesses, Approyo reassessed its operating model during the pandemic.

Before COVID-19, recruitment was largely tied to office locations. Afterwards, the company realised it could recruit globally.

“We literally sat down in a room and we said, well, now we have the opportunity to get the biggest, best and brightest people,” Christopher explained.

The benefits were immediate.

The company expanded internationally, reduced dependence on office space and developed what Christopher describes as a “follow the sun mentality” for customer support.

Yet the same shift exposed a different challenge.

What gets lost when people disappear

Christopher agrees with many of the concerns raised by organisations bringing employees back into offices.

He believes physical workplaces create opportunities for interaction that are difficult to replicate online.

“I like to see people around the coffee pot having conversations and having discussions,” he said.

Those conversations matter because careers often develop through informal exposure rather than formal reporting structures.

A junior employee who solves a problem, volunteers for a project or shares an idea in person becomes visible in a way that cannot always be captured through scheduled video calls.

For Christopher, the office remains a place where relationships form and reputations develop.

“When you’re having a conversation like you and I are doing here, that’s one thing. But when you and I are sitting face-to-face in an office or a conference room or we’re brainstorming, things move at a different pace.”

The challenge is particularly relevant for younger professionals.

Hybrid work offers flexibility, but flexibility does not automatically create influence.

The people who progress are often the people who build relationships across an organisation.

Leadership becomes more deliberate

Christopher does not argue that hybrid work should be abandoned.

His own business depends on it.

Instead, he believes leaders must work harder to maintain connections once employees are distributed.

During and after the pandemic, he began scheduling regular informal conversations with staff. When travelling, he often arranged coffee meetings or walks with employees who lived nearby.

The objective was not oversight.

It was understanding people.

“It’s more personal and more in-depth conversations I have with individuals outside of that,” he said.

Those interactions often reveal concerns, ambitions and frustrations that would never emerge in a formal meeting.

The further people move from shared workplaces, the more intentional leaders must become about creating those opportunities.

“If you’re going to keep them hybrid, yes, you need to be attentive or you’re going to lose your people, especially your best ones.”

The same tension appears in AI

A similar theme runs through Christopher’s views on artificial intelligence.

Much of his current work focuses on helping organisations deploy AI responsibly and securely. He repeatedly argues that companies should rely on clean, contextually relevant data rather than assuming that larger datasets automatically produce better outcomes.

Technology can scale capability.

It cannot remove the need for judgement.

As Christopher puts it, AI should make people “bigger, better, stronger, and faster.”

The same principle applies to hybrid work.

Technology can expand access to talent. It can increase flexibility. It can reduce operational costs.

But it does not eliminate the human relationships on which organisations still depend.

An unresolved trade-off

Christopher sees advantages on both sides of the remote work debate.

Distributed teams create access to talent that many organisations could never otherwise reach.

At the same time, visibility, mentorship and advancement remain closely linked to human interaction.

That tension is unlikely to disappear.

Remote work solved geography.

It did not solve the challenge of helping people see, understand and trust one another.

For organisations building the workforce of the future, that may prove to be the harder problem.

A Crisis at the Top

Forty percent of stressed senior leaders are currently considering stepping down. That figure, drawn from research cited in this episode of The Responsible Edge, describes a leadership crisis arriving at precisely the moment organisations face their most complex operating environment in decades: climate risk, AI disruption, shifting employee expectations, and accelerating regulatory pressure.

The conventional response to leadership burnout is resilience training.

Adrian Ferraro’s argument is that resilience training, delivered in the same environments that produced the burnout, is insufficient.

The intervention has to be structural, physical, and away. His evidence is eleven years of taking people into places where it rains on everyone equally.

Formation

Adrian spent two decades building STC Expeditions, a specialist school expedition company he founded in 2006. Over eighteen years he oversaw more than 300 expeditions to 25 countries, taking over 8,000 teenagers to deserts, rainforests, and six-thousand-metre Himalayan peaks. He navigated the company through the 2010 ash cloud, the Arab Spring, multiple recessions, and the pandemic, before selling to his business partner in October 2024.

The Bioasis, which Adrian founded in 2020 as a pandemic pivot, was the domestic version of that logic. Working on a 5,000-acre private estate in South Devon, it delivered off-grid adventure and conservation programmes to school groups and corporate leadership teams across three self-sufficient base camps.

It planted 3,100 trees, removed two tonnes of plastic from the estuary, and won the Exeter Sustainability Awards in 2025.

The through-line from STC Expeditions to The Bioasis is consistent. Adrian has spent his career designing conditions under which people discover what they are capable of, first teenagers on six-thousand-metre peaks, then executives on three-day immersions in ancient woodland. The proposition in both cases is the same: remove the familiar environment, and people see things differently.

The Argument

Adrian’s case for nature-based leadership intervention is not therapeutic. It is operational.

His starting point is time. “I don’t think we have ten or fifteen years,” he said, describing the lag between educating young people about ecology and seeing that thinking affect boardroom decisions. Working with businesses, by contrast, produces immediate results.

“A business can come in, C-suite group on a retreat with us on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. They can go back to the office on the Monday and go, right, we need to change things here, here and here.”

The off-grid environment does specific work. Hierarchy flattens.

“It doesn’t matter what your title is,” he said. “If it’s raining, it rains on everybody equally.”

Shared physical challenge builds team cohesion that a conference room cannot replicate. Conservation work creates a direct, embodied encounter with long-term consequence: decisions made now, outcomes visible in fifty years.

Adrian is careful about the proposition. The Bioasis was not Bear Grylls. “You don’t have to skin rabbits and sleep under a hedge to become more resilient,” he said. The design principle was type one fun rather than type two: uncomfortable enough to stretch people, comfortable enough to bring them back.

The Structural Problem

The leadership burnout article frames the crisis primarily as a stress problem. Adrian frames it differently. The leaders who are burning out are, in his reading, often the most capable ones: high-achieving, purpose-oriented, willing to take on complexity. They are not burning out because they are weak. They are burning out because the demands being placed on organisations have accelerated beyond what any individual can absorb.

“I don’t think resilience is completely the be all and end all,” he said.

The deeper problem is structural: organisations are being asked to respond to climate risk, changing workforce expectations, and technological disruption simultaneously, while operating models and leadership cultures remain largely unchanged.

He cites a Harvard Business Review finding that nine out of ten people would accept lower pay for more meaningful work. His claim is that purpose-driven organisations attract better people, retain them longer, and perform with more resilience over time. Leadership burnout, in this framing, is partly a symptom of organisations that have not yet made that transition.

The nature retreat is not the solution to that. It is, at best, the condition under which a leadership team might begin to see it clearly.

What Remains Open

The episode’s underlying question is whether organisations will create the conditions for their leaders to think differently before those leaders choose to leave.

Adrian’s answer is measured. The case for stepping away from the office is not intuitive for most executives.

“It feels like I’m stepping out of the office and therefore I’m not working,” he said.

The reframe he is proposing is precise: stepping out is not absence. It is the work.

Whether organisations accept that reframe quickly enough to retain the people making the forty percent calculation is, as of now, open. The structural pressures are not easing. The expectations on leadership are not narrowing. And the evidence, from ecology to organisational psychology, consistently points in the same direction.

“We’re all better humans when we spend time outside,” Adrian said. “We treat people better. We are more calm and relaxed. We make better decisions.”

That argument has not yet moved at the speed the problem requires.

The problem is misdiagnosed

Leaders say they lack time for ethics.

This is the wrong diagnosis.

The constraint is not time. It is definition. Leadership is defined as output delivery. Targets, metrics, throughput. In that definition, ethics has no role. It becomes optional. Then it disappears at the moment it is needed.

This is predictable. Not accidental.

Ethics fails because it is treated as an add-on to a system already operating at capacity.

The operating environment

The context reinforces this failure.

Trust is falling. Two thirds of people believe business leaders mislead. At the same time, information has become unstable. AI increases volume while reducing certainty.

Leaders are now responsible for decisions and for the credibility of the information surrounding them.

This increases pressure. It does not create space.

Formation under pressure

Pablo’s experience is not theoretical. He spent close to twenty years as a chief executive. Before that, he trained as a chartered accountant and held senior finance roles.

He describes leadership conditions directly. “Above a certain speed… the world is coming at you.”

This is the real setting of ethical choice. High velocity. Limited time. Consequences unfolding in parallel.

Any approach to ethics that assumes reflection outside this environment will fail.

The reframing

The key move is simple but non-obvious.

Ethics is not additional work. It is a way of making decisions.

Pablo states it clearly. “That’s not the message at all.”

The alternative framing is this. Ethics acts as a filter. It reduces the decision space. It does not expand it.

“I suppose… this is actually a tool to help the stress become bearable.”

This is the crux. Leaders assume ethics adds complexity. In practice, it can remove it.

The mechanism

Without ethics, decisions are evaluated on financial logic alone. Cost, benefit, risk.

This creates a wide solution space. Many options remain viable. Trade-offs are unresolved. Pressure accumulates.

With ethics, a second constraint is introduced. “What’s the right thing to do?”

This eliminates options early. Some choices are no longer available. The solution space narrows.

Narrowing the space reduces cognitive load. It also clarifies accountability.

This is not moral positioning. It is functional.

The friction

The constraint introduces a different problem.

Ethics is not uniform. “The ethics is in the eye… of the beholder.”

Different leaders will draw different boundaries. This creates disagreement.

The organisation must now manage two types of complexity. External complexity from markets and technology. Internal complexity from competing ethical interpretations.

There is no stable equilibrium.

The real choice

Leaders operate between two models.

In the first, leadership is execution. A “human doing” focused on output. Ethics is deferred because it has no defined place.

In the second, leadership includes judgement. A “human being” with purpose embedded in decisions. Ethics is present because it is part of the decision rule.

The external pressure is identical in both models.

Only the internal definition changes.

Closing

Ethics does not fail because leaders ignore it.

It fails because the system they operate in has no slot for it.

Redefine the role, and ethics becomes usable.

Do not, and it will remain a cost that is never paid.

The promise of proof

Sustainability standards are designed to reassure. They translate environmental and social ambition into measurable criteria. They produce certificates, benchmarks and case studies.

An article by ISEAL, How are sustainability standards driving real world change?, assembles evidence in their favour. It cites modest income increases for small producers within certification schemes. It points to export gains in lower-income countries. It highlights improved carbon management among certified cocoa farmers in Ghana and biodiversity gains under forest certification systems.

The conclusion is measured. Standards are not sufficient alone, but they should be strengthened.

Pooran sees the problem differently. For him, the core issue is not weak standards. It is the belief that standards can deliver transformation.

A systems founder shaped by science

Pooran is the founder of OnePlanet.com, a digital platform built to help governments and organisations map the interconnected effects of their decisions.

His career spans neuroscience, sustainable forestry, real estate development and the creation of the One Planet Living framework, which informed early proposals for the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Pooran describes sustainability as grounded in a basic recognition: “everything is interconnected.” Silos, he argues, exist in organisations and in minds. “Those silos do not exist out there.”

Most institutions manage sustainability through conventional databases structured in rows and columns. OnePlanet.com instead uses graph database architecture, organising information by relationships rather than categories. Policies are broken into “outcomes, actions, indicators,” then linked across departments and sectors. Overlaps, conflicts and shared goals become visible.

The premise is operational rather than rhetorical. If sustainability is about interdependence, the underlying data structure must reflect it.

The certification encounter

Pooran’s scepticism toward standards is rooted in experience.

In the 1990s, he co-founded sustainable forestry enterprises in the UK. The model reintroduced traditional coppice woodland management, regenerating habitats while replacing unsustainable imports. The business developed a distributed production network, supplying local retailers.

When major customers required Forest Stewardship Council certification, the company complied. The process, he says, was “an absolute nightmare.”

Certification increased bureaucracy and cost. More critically, it displaced tacit knowledge. Graduate auditors assessed third- and fourth-generation woodland workers who “lived it, they breathed it, they smelt it.”

Of the auditors, Pooran says: “You’ve got nowhere near their knowledge and understanding.”

Authority shifted from practitioner to certifier. Box-ticking became proof of sustainability.

For Pooran, this inversion exposed a structural risk. Compliance frameworks can narrow attention to what is measured. What falls outside the checklist is discounted.

Evidence and its blind spots

The ISEAL article relies on evidence of measurable gains. Pooran does not dismiss those gains. He questions the framing.

“Evidence is only what you look for,” he says.

Evidence, by definition, reflects past measurement. It captures selected variables. In agriculture, yield increased under intensive methods. Soil degradation, biodiversity loss and nutrient decline were not initially part of the evidence base. They appeared later as “side effects.”

For Pooran, they are not side effects. They are effects that were excluded from focus.

He argues for policy that is “evidence informed” rather than evidence led. Evidence can guide. It cannot define the future. Driving forward by metrics alone risks managing spreadsheets rather than reality.

Standards as floor, not frontier

Pooran does not call for the abolition of standards. He assigns them a narrow role.

“Regs for the dregs,” he says, summarising his position with deliberate bluntness.

Standards should prevent the worst practices. They should set a minimum floor. They should not be treated as markers of leadership or innovation.

The danger arises when certification is equated with excellence. Once a badge signals responsibility, incentives shift toward maintaining compliance rather than pursuing structural change.

In his words, it becomes “a promotion of those people who have ticked those boxes as leaders.”

He extends this concern to ESG and corporate certification schemes more broadly. When legitimacy depends on meeting predefined metrics, the conversation narrows. Authenticity gives way to optimisation.

The question of corporate purpose

At root, Pooran sees the problem as one of governance rather than disclosure.

He traces a shift from nineteenth-century public benefit incorporation toward twentieth-century shareholder primacy. The latter, in his view, distorts incentives. Standards then attempt to correct outcomes without addressing underlying purpose.

If he could alter one feature of the commercial system, it would be this hierarchy of obligation.

Corporate primacy, he argues, should rest with “human and planetary health,” not solely shareholder return.

Standards might still exist in that world. But they would operate as guardrails, not proof of virtue.

Control and complexity

Sustainability standards offer clarity in a complex system. They translate ambition into rules and outcomes into metrics. They create comparability.

Pooran questions whether that clarity is illusory.

If sustainability requires an understanding of interconnectedness, then narrow certification may simplify what cannot be simplified. Systems resist reduction. Interdependence does not fit neatly into a checklist.

The tension remains unresolved. Markets seek certainty. Ecologies operate in relationships.

Standards can measure performance. They cannot, on their own, change the logic of the system being measured.

Confidence in the Face of Weekly Attacks

Cyber attacks are no longer exceptional events. They are operational realities. Ransomware halts systems. Data breaches expose customers. Supply chains stall.

Yet most boards remain confident.

Joseph Hubback, Advisory Partner and CISO at Elixirr, reviewed research across roughly 1,000 companies. Ninety-four percent of boards said they felt comfortable with their security posture.

The statistic sits uneasily alongside the frequency of disruption.

“When the attack happens, the CISO will do all they can,” Joseph says, “but it’s the CEO and the executives that will be in the limelight.”

Cyber security, in that moment, becomes executive.

The issue is not whether frameworks exist. It is whether leadership understands what is truly at risk.

From Industrial Engineering to Cyber Governance

Joseph did not begin in cyber.

He started as an engineer, building chemical factories at ICI Plc. He later moved into commercial and strategic roles before becoming a partner at McKinsey & Company.

Security entered his career through client work in the late 2000s. It remained.

Today, at Elixirr, he advises clients globally while also serving internally as CISO. The combination keeps him close to both governance questions and operational exposure.

The Conversation Has Not Moved On

Executives often repeat that cyber security is no longer just a technical issue. It is a people issue. A leadership issue.

Joseph questions the novelty of that claim.

“Fifteen years ago we were talking about it as a people issue as much as anything else.”

In his view, the language has evolved without changing behaviour. Compliance frameworks have expanded. Certifications are widely pursued. Audit outcomes provide reassurance.

But attackers do not target frameworks. They target value.

The repetition of the insight has not produced structural change.

From Compliance to Asset Protection

Joseph believes education efforts are often misdirected.

Organisations train employees to recognise phishing emails and suspicious links. Attack techniques evolve constantly. The training ages quickly.

He proposes a simpler foundation: define the assets.

In the physical world, people instinctively protect wallets and keys. In the digital world, identity, data, intellectual property and operational systems carry equivalent weight. Yet many leadership teams have not clearly defined what must be protected first.

“If you explain to people what it is that is now important for them to protect,” Joseph says, behaviour changes.

At board level, this means identifying the value streams that generate revenue. Which digital systems enable trading. Which processes, if interrupted, would damage trust or liquidity.

In one client example, business leaders and security teams mapped these value streams together. The dynamic shifted. Security ceased to be viewed as “the department that says no” and became aligned with protecting continuity.

The conversation moved from standards to survival.

Comfort and Exposure

The 94 percent confidence figure remains central.

Boards often equate completed controls with resilience. Certifications and dashboards provide comfort.

Yet when an attack occurs, decisions escalate immediately.

Do we shut systems down.
Who do we inform first.
How do we communicate with customers.
How do we coordinate employees across regions.

“It becomes a collective exercise,” Joseph says. “When an attack happens, you’ll all be involved.”

The exposure is visible. Accountability shifts to the executive team.

Confidence, in that moment, is tested.

From Collaboration to Commitment

Collaboration is frequently cited as the solution.

Industry forums convene. Information is shared. Best practice circulates.

Joseph supports information exchange. He questions whether it goes far enough.

He points to the response following the NotPetya attack on DLA Piper. Clients and competitors provided practical support. Capacity was shared. Documentation was restored. Recovery depended on those relationships.

That cooperation was operational.

Joseph argues that organisations should define such arrangements in advance. Who provides temporary infrastructure. Who safeguards data copies. How supply chains will respond if one party is incapacitated.

Without defined commitments, resilience relies on goodwill.

The distinction is subtle but material. Discussion is not the same as agreement.

Urgency After the Breach

Joseph has observed a pattern.

Following a significant attack, executive attention intensifies. Investment rises. Governance improves. The urgency lasts three to four years.

Then it fades.

Digital transformation, however, continues to expand exposure. Cloud infrastructure grows. Systems integrate further. Ecosystems interconnect.

Risk compounds faster than memory.

Cyber security, Joseph argues, is not primarily a technology problem. It is a governance question.

“When the attack happens,” he says, “it’s the CEO and the executives that will be in the limelight.”

Preparation is quiet. The breach is public.

The distance between those two moments is leadership.

​Scene and Context

Many organisations are busy without being effective. Projects multiply, initiatives overlap, and leaders spend increasing time maintaining activity rather than assessing whether it still serves a clear aim. The result is rarely failure. More often, it is a slow dilution of attention.

John describes this as a leadership problem rather than a structural one. In his view, organisations now operate in conditions that reward visibility and speed over judgment.

Quarterly cycles, constant commentary, and social media noise all push leaders toward doing more, not deciding better.

What suffers is focus. Projects continue not because they work, but because stopping them feels harder than starting something new.

Early discipline and formation

John’s understanding of leadership did not come from business school. He grew up in rural Shropshire, entered work through retail banking, and then chose to become an infantry officer. For ten years, he served in the army, operating in situations where decisions had immediate consequences for others.

That experience shaped his view of responsibility.

Leadership, he learned, was not about visibility or personal advancement, but about making clear decisions under pressure and being accountable for their outcomes.

Those lessons stayed with him as he moved into work at the intersection of business, government, and civil society, including a decade working with the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, on programmes linking business leadership to social and environmental concerns.

Accumulating experience across systems

Over the next three decades, John moved between roles that rarely sit together on a conventional career path. He led non-profit initiatives, built his own advisory business, and later became EMEA managing partner at Omnicom.

Rather than specialising in one sector, he accumulated exposure to how decisions are made across different systems. He worked with large corporations, charities, public bodies, and founders.

Over time, a pattern became clear to him. Activity was often mistaken for progress.

Organisations launched initiatives that looked responsible or innovative but sat alongside incentives that rewarded entirely different behaviour. In those moments, John became increasingly sceptical of programmes that existed at the margins rather than shaping core decisions.

Founding Anthropy

The pandemic sharpened that scepticism. Watching the strain placed on Britain’s social and economic fabric, John became concerned about how leaders were thinking about recovery and long-term direction.

In response, he founded Anthropy. Anthropy was conceived not as a conference business, but as a national leadership gathering focused on Britain’s long-term future. It brings together leaders from business, government, civil society, and younger generations.

The gathering takes place at the Eden Project, with sessions held inside the biomes rather than traditional conference spaces.

The environment is deliberate. It slows the pace and changes how conversations unfold.

Anthropy now involves thousands of participants, hundreds of speakers, and a significant emerging leaders programme for those aged eighteen to thirty. John describes this group as one of the most serious and hopeful aspects of the gathering.

The difficulty of stopping

John is clear that leadership failure rarely comes from backing the wrong idea. It more often comes from not knowing when to stop.

He distinguishes between three types of projects. Some succeed clearly. Some fail visibly.

The hardest are those that sit in the middle, producing just enough activity to justify their continuation without delivering meaningful results.

In his own career, John describes initiatives he allowed to fade once it became clear they would not deliver the collective impact he had hoped for. Ending them was not dramatic. It required detachment rather than urgency.

He notes that organisations routinely apply sell-by dates to products but almost never to internal initiatives. Without agreed endpoints, projects persist through habit and emotional attachment rather than relevance.

Purpose as a practical filter

For John, purpose is not a slogan or a communications device. It is a tool for decision-making.

When an organisation is clear about why it exists, decisions become simpler. Opportunities that sit outside that purpose can be declined without debate. Authority can be delegated because people understand the criteria behind decisions.

He contrasts this with organisations where purpose is displayed everywhere but shapes nothing.

In those cases, slogans coexist with incentives that reward contradictory behaviour. The result is not cynicism, but underperformance.

Employees can work without clarity. They work better with it. Purpose, when taken seriously, reduces distraction and narrows focus.

The unresolved tension

Despite progress in how organisations talk about responsibility, John remains concerned about short-termism. Quarterly reporting, constant media cycles, and performative leadership push decision-making toward immediacy rather than durability.

He believes this is as much a cultural issue as an economic one. Leaders are rewarded for speed, reaction, and visibility.

Maturity and restraint receive less attention.

Yet he remains optimistic. Through Anthropy’s emerging leaders programme, John sees younger leaders already practising a slower, more deliberate form of leadership. They are less interested in performance and more concerned with consequence.

Closing reflection

Modern organisations are not short of ideas. They are short of judgment.

Responsible leadership, in John’s view, requires fewer initiatives, clearer decisions, and the discipline to stop.

In an environment that rewards noise, responsibility may begin with restraint.