Sir Steve Lancashire is Chair of Forum Strategy’s National #TrustLeaders CEO network. He also provides mentoring for CEOs across our network and through the Being The CEO programme. In this month’s blog, Sir Steve shares his reflections on our eighth national #TrustLeaders CEO conference, which focused on the evolution of the CEO role.
He reflects on some key learning points from the day, focusing specifically on how these can lead to tangible, impactful actions that enable the betterment of our leadership and our organisations. Further content from the event will be shared on our post-conference webpage.
When we talk about evolution, most of us think about science, the way living organisms adapt to survive in new environments. Variation, inheritance, natural selection. But evolution isn’t just about biology. As we heard very clearly at our national CEO conference last week, it’s just as relevant to our leadership as CEOs, to our organisations, and to the sector in which we seek to thrive.
At its heart, evolution is about survival, about finding ways to adapt when the environment no longer looks the same. In nature, species don’t evolve because they want to, but because they have to: food runs out, climates change, conditions shift. And those that don’t adapt, don’t last.
The same question now sits in front of us as CEOs and as trusts.
But why does it? Why is there a pressing need for us to evolve? Very simply, because right now, we are in a moment where our environment has shifted. Hard.
