Leadership Development's Best Kept Secret and Why That Is About to Change

Over recent years, the frequency at which people have expressed surprise when they learn about LIW has increased steadily. The surprise comes from the contrast: a client list that includes Oracle, Salesforce, The World Bank, Cisco, Telstra, Coles and Novartis alongside hundreds of other organisations across 26 countries; work that has touched more than 300,000 leaders spanning Fortune 500 companies to government agencies; and yet an organisational profile that is known by few in the wider conversation about leadership development.

The question that follows is always some version of the same thing: "How have I not heard of LIW?”

The answer is straightforward and is a product of a series of deliberate choices we have made while building an exceptionally high-impact leadership development practice.

Discretion as a service, not an absence

Leadership development happens in conditions that require trust. It involves moments of vulnerability, uncertainty, and honest reckoning with patterns that are not working. It touches power, identity, relationship, and purpose. People open up when they know their learning will not become content. They take risks when they trust the container will hold.

This shapes what becomes possible in a room, in a coaching conversation ,in a moment of feedback that could go either way. The most consequential leadership moments are rarely public moments. They happen when someone is willing to see something they have been avoiding, or when a team finally names a dynamic that has been eroding their work together, or when a leader decides to act on a principle that will cost them something.

That kind of work requires discretion and clear boundaries that protect what matters. For three decades, we have held that boundary because the work required it. And we still do.

30 years of practice and a foundation to build from

The way LIW grew reflects this commitment. Since our founding in 1996, our growth has been overwhelmingly organic, through clients and colleagues who knew the work and chose to recommend it.

This approach was not a constraint. It built an organisation grounded in the quality of the work itself, and relationships that deepened over years rather than transactions that closed in weeks. That longevity reflects not loyalty for its own sake, but partnership built on results that are truly high impact, low maintenance.

It worked because the leadership landscape allowed it to work. There was less noise competing for attention in a sector where reputation still mattered more than visibility. In recent years, that context has changed, and so must we.

What has changed in the leadership landscape

Leaders now operate in conditions of sustained volatility. The pace of change has accelerated to the point where trial and error is no longer are liable teacher. Cycles that once gave time for reflection and adjustment now compress learning into real-time decision-making under uncertainty.

Polarisation has intensified, both socially and politically, and those tensions increasingly enter workplaces. The capacity to sustain productive disagreement, to hold complexity without collapsing into certainty or avoidance, is under pressure everywhere.

Technology, particularly AI, is moving faster than most leadership capability can absorb. Leaders are navigating ethical, relational, and strategic implications without adequate preparation, often without adequate dialogue, and frequently without the judgement structures that would allow them to make sense of what is unfolding.

At the same time, the information environment has become noisier. The incentives favour confidence over nuance, performance over substance. There is more leadership content than ever before, and much of it is shallow.

None of this is unique to any one sector or geography. We see these patterns recurring across technology companies wrestling with responsible innovation, logistics organisations managing distributed operations under pressure, financial institutions balancing growth with risk, and city governments attempting to serve increasingly complex constituencies. It is systemic, and it means that the conditions under which leadership must be developed have fundamentally shifted.

Why the quiet approach is no longer sufficient

When we see the same leadership challenges recurring across different organisations, different sectors, different countries, when we watch leaders struggling with the same patterns, often in isolation, withholding learning at the system level starts to look like a risk rather than a virtue.

This is not about claiming we have answers others lack. It is about recognising that when capability lags this far behind complexity, and when the cost of fragmented learning is this high, contributing to collective sense-making becomes a responsibility.

Discretion at the client level remains essential. That does not change. But discretion does not require isolation at the sector level. It is possible to share patterns without sharing particulars. It is possible to contribute insight while protecting confidentiality. And it is possible to do both in ways that strengthen rather than undermine trust.

Dialogue as the mode of contribution

If leadership is built through dialogue inside organisations and our experience across three decades says it is, then the leadership sector itself must model dialogue rather than declaration.

This means showing up differently than much of what currently fills the space. It means resisting the pull toward certainty and the pressure to perform expertise. It means being willing to share what we are learning, to invite challenge, to acknowledge what we do not know, and to engage with others who are doing serious work in ways that advance the field rather than just individual organisations.

Dialogue is not a value statement. It is an operational capability. Research on psychological safety, learning, and team reflexivity makes clear that the quality of dialogue determines the quality of thinking, and the quality of thinking determines the quality of decision-making under pressure. The same principle applies at the sector level.

If we believe leadership development should help leaders navigate complexity with better judgement, then the way we engage as a sector must reflect that same discipline.

What LIW brings to the dialogue

Our work has always been experiential rather than purely conceptual. We focus on building real-time judgement, not just embedding frameworks. We strengthen leaders' capacity to make values-driven decisions when the stakes are high and the path is unclear. And we integrate future-oriented thinking, not by claiming to predict what is coming, but by helping leaders develop the adaptive capability to navigate whatever does.

This orientation, blending local insight with global perspective, bringing fresh thinking while remaining grounded in what works, has allowed us to build partnerships that deliver measurable, enduring results. But it is not about method or program. It is about taking seriously the conditions leaders actually face, the pressures they are actually under, and the capability they actually need to build.

The work ahead will demand more than expertise, it will require judgment, humility, and a willingness to stay present when answers are not yet clear. That is what we bring toa conversation that must now involve more voices, more perspectives, and more collective learning than any single organisation can generate alone.

Thirty years as a threshold, not a victory lap

This year marks LIW's 30^th anniversary and we are not treating it as a celebration of arrival. We are treating it as a threshold.

Discretion in client work remains unchanged. The standards that have guided this work remain unchanged. But we are now choosing to open a different kind of conversation, one that invites critique as much as contribution, and one that builds the muscles for how we disagree with each other. One that assumes we have as much to learn as to offer and takes seriously the possibility that the sector itself must evolve if the leaders it serves are to meet what is ahead.