(1) Using data in novel ways to understand the talent around you; (2) Staying current with external research on what kinds of leaders are important for the time; (3) bringing in strategic Ai plays such as Verti role playing for practice and repetition

Three areas are particularly interesting to me right now: 

1. First is using data in smarter ways to understand leadership influence. Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) looks at how people actually interact across the organization and identifies the informal influencers who shape decisions and adoption. When I worked at Allstate, we used ONA to determine who were highly connected “change influencers” and then used them as a way to help surface real employee feedback and accelerate transformation more effectively than traditional top-down change models.  
2. Second is staying grounded in external research so that we can run leadership programs that prepare managers for the future. At Prudential we created a program called  “Leader of the Future" based on research from groups like the World Economic Forum and Deloitte.  This "outside-in" perspective suggested that future leaders will need to combine three capabilities: leading with data and analytics, driving innovation and disruption, and actively developing talent to adapt to changing roles, so that is what we created!  We continue to re-tool it as new key capabilities emerge.  
3. Third is bringing in AI-enabled practice environments. Tools like Virti allow leaders to practice difficult conversations and leadership scenarios with AI avatars, giving them a safe place to build real behavioral muscle through repetition and feedback.  This is especially important for making our leadership training stick, espeically with programs like Situational Leadershihp II, which is simple in concept, but often challenging in practice.