The Leadership Trust Reckoning

Evidence used to be the end of an argument. It is now the beginning of one. When a document, a recording, a dataset or a face can be manufactured convincingly and cheaply, the question inside every institution shifts from what the evidence shows to whether the evidence is real — and then to who gets to decide that.

This is the leadership test of the next five years, and most organisations are unprepared for it. This keynote is about legitimacy: how leaders establish that what they are telling people is true, in an environment where proof is contestable and confidence is cheap to fabricate. Dr Kate Barker draws on doctoral research into what generative artificial intelligence does to organisational trust, and on advisory work with boards and heads of state facing the problem in its most consequential form.

The session is practical about what holds when evidence stops holding: institutional processes that can be audited, leaders who are visible when the news is bad, a clear chain of human accountability for consequential decisions, and the discipline to say what is not yet known. It also confronts the internal version of the problem — the manufactured certainty of a confident machine answer inside a leadership team that has no way to test it.

Especially suited to boards, chief executives, general counsel, communications and risk leaders, regulators and policy forums, and mainstage audiences in financial services, media, government and healthcare.