Season Finale - 2026 Forecast: Preparing for the Future of Leadership

In the session, David and Emma will discuss the most significant challenges leaders faced this year—from overwhelming complexity to the constant pressure for innovation, all while navigating the questions of how and where to use AI. Discover how NLI's work, including our NeuroIntelligent Leadership Enhancing System (NILES), has evolved to help leaders overcome these challenges through seamless integration of coherent insights. David and Emma will also reveal their predictions for what to expect from 2026. Get exclusive insights into the key trends and shifts that will define the organizational landscape next year. Walk away with a set of strategies and habits you need to adopt now to prepare your people and leaders for success in the new year.

In a world defined by accelerating change, overwhelm, and complexity, traditional models of leadership development are outdated. Now is the time to consider your 2026 strategy – one that moves from a series of disconnected events to a simple, scalable, and science-backed blueprint for real transformation.

Leaders don’t just need AI, they need a leadership AI that creates an ecosystem of coherent insights that makes them smarter and more effective. Join us for this week's Your Brain at Work, featuring NLI’s CEO and Co-Founder, Dr. David Rock, and VP of Solutions, Rachel Cardero, as they discuss how a leadership AI should be designed. The future of leadership AI is both predictive and coherent. It’s designed not only to support leaders in the flow of work but also to deliver predictive “neuro-intelligent nudges”— personalized actions based on what it has learned about the leader and their colleagues. A leadership AI should help overcome the challenges leaders face before they happen through seamless integration of coherent insights. This is the future of NILES, our NeuroIntelligent Leadership Enhancing System. Join David and Rachel as they reveal how neuroscience is shaping the newest version of NILES — and what exciting developments are on the horizon.

Today’s leaders are constantly trying to keep up with the complexity of the organizational landscape, all while making smarter decisions and driving their teams towards innovation. Join us for the next edition of "Your Brain at Work Live," where Dr. Emma Sarro discusses how NILES, the NeuroLeadership Institute's AI leadership coach, is set to revolutionize how leaders face each of these challenges. Most AI chatbots are designed to spit out answers like a simple search engine, which research shows only dulls our thinking. NILES is designed to generate moments of insight, sparking motivation to act, creativity and growth. In this session, you’ll discover the scientific foundation of NILES and how it can guide leaders to tap into their innate creativity, facilitating moments of insight that lead to transformative solutions. Drs. Rock and Sarro will discuss the science behind insight generation, pulled from over twenty years of coaching experience and peer-reviewed research. They’ll share how NILES is already driving leaders to insight in every conversation, increasing their critical thinking, creative problem solving, and strengthening their EQ. Don't miss this opportunity to discover how NILES can be your partner in achieving smarter, more effective leadership.

In this episode of Your Brain at Work, we unlock the secrets to embedding effective and resilient habits. In today’s environment of accelerating change and overwhelming demands, building strong habits – those that become default under pressure – is more crucial than ever. Organizations need strategies that work quickly and scale easily, and are more helpful than telling people to rely on repetition. For over 25 years, NLI has been embedding habits quickly and at scale in organizations, transforming cultures in the process. Whether you're looking to build your own new habits or lead your team through transformative change, we’ll cover the strategies and key insights that help you succeed. Discover how to leverage the power of neuroscience to create lasting, impactful habits that support your goals and withstand the pressures of modern life. In this session, Drs. David Rock and Emma Sarro, will explore the latest neuroscience research on why the right habits are so important to build and how to do it in a way that sticks.

Meet the world’s smartest leadership coach, NILES, NLI’s Neuro Intelligent Leadership Enhancing System. Designed to make leaders smarter, faster. In today's tricky environment, leaders are under pressure to do more with less, juggling multiple responsibilities with limited resources. What leaders need is an AI tailored to meet their specific challenges. One that provides in-the-moment support, offering insights that are both easily digestible and immediately actionable. A leadership AI should both enhance leaders’ decision-making making, stress management, and help them boost their teams’ engagement and productivity. Unlike generic AI tools, a leadership-focused AI needs to understand the constant overwhelm leaders face. Join Dr. David Rock, CEO and CoFounder of the NeuroLeadership Institute and Rachel Cardero, Vice President of Consulting and Solutions, on the next Your Brain at Work, as they discuss what a leadership AI needs and how NLI has responded to this need with its own leadership AI – NILES: Neuro Intelligent Leadership Enhancing System. Attendees will experience NILES in action. Drawing upon over 25 years of using neuroscience to develop leaders and drive performance, NILES is ready to revolutionize leadership.

Organizations are facing a complex landscape of challenges and potential crises, driven by rapid technological advancements, shifting economic conditions, and evolving global events. Frameworks such as VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) and the more recent BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible) are used to understand the challenges of navigating complex and unpredictable environments. Organizational leaders face the outsized responsibility of helping their teams prepare for and approach these challenges while maintaining high performance. As we consider the role leaders play in the success of their teams and organizations, what skills can help them drive performance and inspire great work amid challenges? Join Drs. David Rock and Emma Sarro as they discuss the right mindset to lead in a crisis and the necessary skills all leaders need to maintain productivity and efficiency, reduce uncertainty, and increase relatedness.

AI agents are continuously evolving in ways that increase their potential to support our work. Not only can they synthesize long meetings and moments later provide you with key insights, ideas, and actions, they can also write your emails, plan an upcoming conversation, and make difficult decisions for you. However, does AI actually improve your ability to do these things, and is the output better than what a human could do alone? For example, even though you have the meeting notes, will you actually understand what was discussed and be able to make good decisions from the summary? Will it help you identify the right path forward and give you the motivation to take steps that might be challenging? Research shows that if we rely on AI too often or use it in the wrong ways, it could actually dull our thinking. Join Drs. David Rock and Emma Sarro as they discuss what “better” thinking means from the perspective of the brain and how AI can be used to get there. Learn the key behaviors that can turn AI from merely a tool into a collaborator.

Conventional wisdom suggests that if you want people to participate, you need to mandate it. However, this can easily backfire. What research suggests is that if you want people to participate and get the most out of this participation, you need to make it compelling. Getting people to fully engage in learning, transformation or even just to attend an important organizational event is a central challenge for HR or talent functions. During times of intense change, this can often appear to be less important, when in fact, it may be even more critical. If you’re looking to achieve something beyond just compliance, you need to design in a way that compels people to fully participate and engage – a challenge when most of us are busy and overwhelmed. In this timely conversation, Drs. David Rock and Emma Sarro will explore insights from both science and decades of practice, including the non-obvious downsides of making learning mandatory, and three areas to focus on when making experiences truly compelling.

Uncertainty surrounds the future of DEI. Many organizations plan to continue their DEI work, yet they’re likely to face a number of challenges along the way. To be successful as we evolve our work, it's important to understand why DEI efforts became a priority in the first place, and whether they’re important enough for organizations to address in other packaging. What are the short- and long-term impacts of rolling back the work? Although DEI programs are sometimes politicized, limiting their effectiveness, there are several reasons why organizations need to address certain quirks of the human brain to achieve their best. Join Drs. David Rock and Emma Sarro as they discuss the core brain processes that make DEI work indispensable. A focus for this discussion will be our cognitive biases — mental shortcuts we’ve evolved to make decisions quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, cognitive biases can also cause us to make poor decisions that negatively impact our employees and business. We’ll explore the major biases that affect our work and how to mitigate them to make better business decisions.