QUARTERLY LETTER: MARCH, 2026
As an executive search consultancy, working across energy, resources, infrastructure and technology, the question of leadership capability is never far from our thinking.
There is a question I keep hearing in the many conversations I am having across these sectors.
So many organisations are, in some form, already moving towards meeting the emerging technology revolution which is playing out in front of us. However, this question—urgent as it feels right now—is really a version of a question leaders have faced before, each time an emerging technology has arrived and promised to change everything.
Sometimes it does; and often it changes more than we anticipated, and in ways we didn’t plan for.
However, the question that matters, then and now, is not whether to move, it is whether the organisation has the leadership to guide the technology well. To capture its genuine benefits without losing sight of what only people can do.
Right now, with artificial intelligence (AI), I am not sure the answer is always yes.
Across the sectors my team and I work in, AI has already moved its posture from an experiment or emerging capability worth watching to something far more foundational. Something woven into engineering modelling, knowledge transfer, operational decision-making, and increasingly, into business models themselves.
One conversation that has stayed with me came from a senior leader in engineering consulting. He was clear-eyed about where the industry is heading: the model of billing for human hours on tasks that can be automated will, before long, simply stop making sense.
The economics are changing. And with them, the leadership challenges are changing too.
The capability gap
What concerns me more than the pace of adoption is the gap between ambition and leadership readiness.
The organisations navigating this gap most thoughtfully are those that are building the internal leadership capability to manage it. Beyond merely acquiring tools, they are also developing the judgement to know which decisions belong with people and which can be safely delegated to a system. The leaders I most respect in this space are asking harder questions: about governance, about oversight, about what it means to remain responsible for outcomes when the process is increasingly automated.
This is emerging clearly in natural resources. As experienced operators retire, AI is being used to capture what those people know—turning decades of operational knowledge into something the next generation can learn from. It is a meaningful application of the technology. But it requires something AI cannot supply on its own: human judgement about what to capture, how to use it, and where the limits are.
The ethical boundaries.
The emphasis, as I am hearing it, is less on large-scale platforms and more on targeted, practical applications that genuinely augment frontline capability—with people remaining firmly in charge of the decisions that matter most.
The organisations getting this right are not outsourcing the question entirely to vendors or external partners. They are building the internal leadership capability to evaluate, choose, and manage those partnerships well. Technology development is increasingly happening through collaboration and shared ecosystems—and that is a genuine strength. But it requires leaders who can operate within those ecosystems with discernment. And the leadership capabilities this moment demands are not primarily technical. They are human qualities. The same qualities that have separated good leaders from great ones every time an emerging technology has reshaped an industry.
Humility, first.
The willingness to stay curious and honest about what you don’t know, even as the pressure to project confidence grows. Leaders who have navigated previous technology shifts well share something in common: they remained genuinely uncertain for longer than their peers, asked better questions, and resisted the temptation to treat a new capability as a solved problem.
Judgement, second.
The capacity to hold the line on decisions that should remain with people. To know when to move fast and when to slow down. To build systems and processes that create consistent performance without eroding the human accountability at the centre of them. In a volatile environment, consistent performance does not happen by chance. Repeatability matters.
Clarity of purpose and direction, third.
Clarity of purpose, and a clear north star remain so very important in the VUCA world.
The leaders who navigate these moments well are those who can hold a clear sense of purpose while remaining genuinely adaptable to what the technological shifts make possible. Leading through our principles and shared vision, rather than command and control, is a leader’s strongest set of tools.
In a decentralised, technology-enabled organisation, it is also a strategic one.
Our focus for this quarter
For our own part, we are applying the same discipline to our work that I am describing here. As an agile and flexible team, this quarter, we are sharpening our sector and subsector focus—going deeper where our expertise and track record are strongest, and being more deliberate about where we direct our energy.
This means working with organisations where the leadership challenges are real and the appetite for progressive thinking is genuine. It means being the partner who understands the energy, resources, infrastructure and technology sectors intimately. And staying close to the conversations that are shaping what great leadership looks like across these industries.
Artificial intelligence will keep moving. We know this. You know this. The pace will not slow, and the questions will remain difficult, ambiguous and at times, unclear. This is the nature of emerging technologies—they do not wait for organisations to feel ready, and they do not reward those who treat them as someone else’s problem to solve.
But the leaders who make the greatest difference in this moment will not be defined by how quickly they adopted the technology, but by the humility, judgement, and clarity they brought to the moment.
That is the leadership we are here to support.
Warm regards,
Alex Goldrick
Managing Director
Goldrick Consulting
