We’ve been having the wrong conversation.

I have always been fascinated by leadership. It’s why I was a senior leader for 25 years and it is why I coach leaders now.

The leaders who come to me aren’t underperformers. They aren’t broken. They are high-calibre, board-trusted senior executives, scoring well on every existing tool, being told by every familiar instrument they are tracking nicely. But they are losing ground, quietly, week by week, to a generation of leaders who never learned to lead the old way and aren’t waiting for permission to lead the new way.

The leaders I have been coaching are being measured against the wrong era. That is the thing I couldn’t unsee.

The leadership development industry spent a large part of the 1980s to early 2000’s building a set of tools: 360s, personality profiles, competency frameworks, the proprietary models consultancies sell to HR teams as evidence someone is or isn’t ‘ready’. These old tools answer one question: how does this leader compare to the leader we needed 5/10/15 years ago?

They were built by people who came of age in stable systems, for organisations that assumed the next decade would broadly look like the last.

But here is the part the old tools really get wrong. They don’t just measure the wrong things, they produce the wrong conversations.

• ·A 360 gives you a defence.
• ·A personality profile gives you a label.
• ·A competency framework gives you a checklist.

None of these give you new language. None of these open a conversation you haven’t already had a hundred times with a hundred other leaders being assessed against the same framework.

So I went looking for a tool that did. Nothing existed. Not even close. I looked carefully because I wanted to be wrong. I’m a coach, not a product builder. I would have happily licensed a worthy instrument and got on with the work. But the tools that existed measured the leaders against the standards of the 1990’s — early 2000’s.

So I partnered with Jonah Jones, who I’d met and coached early 2025, to build it.

With Jonah’s inquisitive, tech curious and builder bias nature, we created the Future Fluency Index (FFi).

For those of you who have already completed the FFi diagnostic, the fifteen minutes you spent, the score sitting in front of you now, is the start of a different conversation. A conversation built on shared language about decision integrity, on shared language about velocity and momentum, on shared language about the dimensions most leadership conversations don’t yet have words for.

That is what changes when the tools change. Not the leader, the rippling conversations and action it propels.

FFi’s scorecard tells you where you stand. What happens next is what we built for: a different kind of coaching, a different kind of peer dialogue, a different kind of board conversation, a different kind of self-assessment. New language unlocks new thinking. New thinking unlocks new behaviour. New behaviour, eventually, unlocks new impact.

That is the work. That is what FFi is the gateway to.

The instruments we’ve been using were built for a leader the world has moved on from. The conversations we’ve been having were built on those instruments. Both need replacing, and replacing the instrument is the part that has to come first.

Every leader should understand where they actually stand. Not where their last performance review said they stood. Not where their LinkedIn endorsements suggest they stand. Where the evidence says they stand right now, for the world that is arriving, not the one already navigated.

That is what FFi is. That is why we built it.

The work is measurable. The diagnostic just hadn’t been built yet, so we bloody well built it! After all, if you’re not learning to lead for the future, you’re not leading. And if the conversation you’re having about your leadership doesn’t have language for what’s actually changing, you’re not having the right conversation.