When I wrote my book Lead the Future in 2021, I made the case that leaders needed to be curious about technology. Not experts, just curious. Open. Willing to surround themselves with people who understood it more than they did.
That was enough then. It is not enough now.
Generative AI has moved from experimentation to everyday operations. AI tools are being integrated into HR systems, finance functions, and customer service across industries. The leaders who are still in the “I’m just exploring” phase are not early adopters anymore. They are late. And the bar is not going back to where it was.
The Leadership Risk Nobody’s Talking About
Let’s start with what is actually at stake when leaders don’t make this shift.
Leaders who stay passively curious about technology and are delegating all digital decisions to others, waiting until they feel ready before engaging, are handing over influence on some of the most consequential decisions their organisations will face in the next decade.
The people they lead notice. Particularly younger, digitally native team members. They are watching, and part of how they measure leadership quality is whether their leader understands the world they are actually working in.
Digital passivity is not a style preference anymore. It is a leadership risk.
Now here is what changes when leaders develop real digital fluency. This is not about becoming a technologist. It is about being genuinely informed. Confident enough to ask the tough questions. To challenge a recommendation. To understand the strategic implications of a technology decision, even if you could not build it yourself.
Leaders who get to that level make better decisions about technology adoption. They protect their people through transitions because they actually understand what is changing and what it means. And they model the thing the whole organisation is watching for: whether this is a place that faces the future, or one that is waiting it out.
You Don’t Have to Read the X-Ray. But You Do Need to Read the Room.
Think of a surgeon who delegates all X-ray reading to a radiologist and then makes surgical decisions based on a summary. The radiologist is essential. But the surgeon who cannot read the image is making high-stakes calls with a significant gap in their understanding.
You don’t have to be the radiologist. You do need to be able to read the room.
What I’ve Been Seeing in Coaching Right Now
I have been coaching a senior leader at a large financial services organisation. I’ll call her Amira. She is sharp, experienced and highly respected across the business. She is also terrified every time the technology conversation comes up in the room.
Her organisation has been rolling out an AI-enabled customer service platform. For months, she had nodded through executive meetings, approving budgets and timelines for a transformation she didn’t fully understand, hoping no one would ask her a direct question.
When we started working together, I didn’t ask her to become a technologist. I asked her to identify five questions she needed to answer confidently. Not technical questions. Strategic ones. Things like: what is this system actually doing with our customer data? What does failure look like, and who is accountable for it? What happens to the roles that change?
She told me later that getting clear on those five questions completely changed her relationship with the whole initiative. She stopped performing understanding and started actually building it. People come to her now when they want a straight conversation about what the technology was actually for. Not because she had learned to code. Because she had learned to lead the conversation.
The Numbers Are Pretty Stark
The data is pretty clear on this. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 flagged technology literacy as one of the fastest-growing critical leadership capabilities globally, and noted the gap between what organisations need and what their leaders currently have is getting wider, not smaller. A 2025 McKinsey survey found that while nearly 70% of organisations are now using generative AI in at least one business function, fewer than 30% of senior leaders feel confident making informed strategic decisions about it. That confidence gap is directly linked to slower adoption, higher implementation failure rates, and greater workforce disruption. It is not a small issue.
Where Do You Sit on the Digital Fluency Ladder?
Most leaders in 2021 were at Level 2 on the Digital Fluency Ladder: Curious. That was the right place to be at the time. The shift most senior leaders need to make now is from Level 2 to Level 3, from Curious to Informed. Not Pioneering. Not technically Fluent. Just informed enough to lead the conversation rather than follow it.
The goal is not mastery. It is moving one rung.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler from his publication ‘Future Shock’
Four places to start:
1. Identify your five strategic technology questions. Not technical ones. Strategic ones. What do you need to understand about the decisions your organisation is making right now to lead with confidence? Write them down. Spend the next 90 days building your informed answers, starting with your own team’s technology landscape.
2. Close the translation gap. For every significant technology decision, ask three things: what does this mean for our customers, what does this mean for our people, and what does this mean for how we lead? If you can answer those three questions clearly, you are leading the technology. Not the other way around.
3. Make one deliberate learning move per month. Not a course, not a certification. A briefing from your technical team. A conversation with a peer who has navigated something similar. A podcast, a book, a demonstration. Small and consistent compounds fast.
4. Model learning out loud. The most powerful thing you can do to build digital fluency across your organisation is to let people see you building yours. Say in meetings that you are still learning. Ask questions that signal curiosity rather than expertise. In a world where many leaders are quietly terrified of the technology conversation, the one who is genuinely engaged with it gives everyone else permission to be, too.
If you want to go deeper across all 12 skills in Lead the Future, the book is available to order here: https://intactteams.com/lead-the-future-book/