Instead of ending the year with a list of “top posts,” we wanted to do something more useful: look across everything we wrote in 2025 and ask a simple question:
What were leaders really trying to figure out this year?
Across articles on AI, burnout, leading through change, strategy execution, and more, a set of themes kept surfacing: Leaders were wrestling with what it means to lead well in a world where expectations, tools, and pressures keep shifting.
Here are five big questions that emerged from a year of Insight Experience writing.
1. How do we create clarity when everything is noisy?
If there was one recurring concern, it was this: How do we create real clarity for teams when the environment is anything but clear?
We saw this in pieces on:
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Leading through disruption and uncertainty – Posts like "How Leaders Can Thrive in Uncertain Times" and “How Leaders Can Navigate Business Trends Wisely” reminded leaders that chasing every new idea is not strategy.
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Strategy execution and alignment – “5 Signs Your Organization Needs Strategy Execution Training” and “3 Must-Reads on Executing Strategy” dug into what happens when leaders assume clarity exists but the organization’s behavior tells a different story.
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Communicating direction – “Sail Smoothly: How to Build a Clear, Consistent Communication Plan” reframed communication not as a series of announcements but as an intentional system.
The through-line is that clarity is a continuous leadership practice. Leaders in 2025 were trying to separate signal from noise, turn strategy into choices, and help their teams make sense of shifting priorities without burning out.
2. How should we engage with AI without losing the plot?
Unsurprisingly, AI showed up everywhere this year, and it was more than just a buzzword.
We explored AI from multiple angles:
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Foundations: “The Leadership Imperative: AI Literacy & Adoption” pushed leaders to move beyond fear or hype and build basic literacy so that they could ask better questions and make better decisions.
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Governance and judgment: “The Strategic Leader’s Guide to AI: Adoption & Governance” focused on the leadership work behind AI, ensuring the right guardrails, ethics, and alignment with strategy.
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Systems thinking: “Leading Through AI: Managing the Business, People, and Tech Systems” looked at AI not as a tool in isolation but as something that touches the business system and the people system simultaneously.
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Human development: “Can AI Be a Coach? A Certified Coach’s Self-Coaching Experiment with AI” raised the uncomfortable-but-necessary question of when AI adds value to development and when a human is non-negotiable.
The underlying question wasn’t “Should we use AI?” It was: How do we harness AI in ways that support better leadership, instead of outsourcing leadership judgment to the algorithm?
3. How do we care for people and performance at the same time?
Another strong pattern in 2025 was leaders feeling the tension between pressure for results and the realities of human well-being.
A few pieces made that tension explicit:
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Burnout as a leadership signal – “How Leaders Can Address Burnout at Its Root Cause” argued that burnout is rarely an individual failing and more often a structural or leadership issue.
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Rethinking labels – “Rethinking the ‘Toxic Boss’ Label” challenged oversimplified narratives and called for more nuanced diagnosis of what’s really going wrong in teams.
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Confidence and equity – “Leadership Confidence: Women Deserve Better Than Imposter Syndrome” reframed the issue from fixing confidence to fixing the systems that erode it.
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The hidden power of the people system – “The People System: Your Hidden Strategic Engine” made the case that how you manage roles, feedback, decision rights, and development is core strategy work.
The big 2025 insight is that you don’t choose between caring for people and driving results. The way you structure work, communicate, and lead is a performance lever.
4. How do we stay intentional about growth in a changing environment?
This year, leaders and organizations were trying to stay intentional about growth amid shifting expectations and environments:
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From the leader’s perspective: In “Owning Your Career: A Leadership Perspective” and “Owning Your Career: Finding Your Place,” co-founder Nick Noyes explored what it really looks like to take responsibility for your growth—not as a solo act, but in partnership with your organization.
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For new leaders: The Practical Tips for New Leaders series tackled concrete skills: working with senior leaders and writing strong emails. These skills build credibility and influence.
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At the organizational level: “Saying ‘Not Now’ to Leadership Development? Think Again” pushed back on the instinct to cut development when things get busy or budgets tighten, arguing that delaying investment in leaders almost always costs more later.
Add to that “Summer Reading for Leaders: The Insight Experience Way” and “What Learning to Code Taught Me About Leadership,” and you get a clear picture: In 2025, leaders were trying to figure out how to stay intentional and curious about their own growth in the middle of everything else.
5. What kind of learning actually changes behavior?
Finally, we kept coming back to a core Insight Experience question: What forms of learning actually shift how leaders think and act?
This showed up in several ways:
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Business simulations as mindset builders – “How Business Simulations Build Leadership Mindsets That Last” and “Why Fictional Business Simulations Drive Real Learning” explored why realistic, metaphor-rich simulations often work better than literal replicas of a client’s org chart.
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Microlearning with real stakes – “How Microlearning Supports Purpose-Driven Learning and Development” uses the Raregivers collaboration to show how Insight 2 Go can bring decision-based microlearning into emotionally charged, non-corporate contexts like caregiving.
Taken together, the message is straightforward: Leaders grow through experience. In 2025, leaders and organizations were seeking experiences that mirror real decisions, supported by feedback, reflection, and enough psychological safety to truly experiment.
We also saw this theme in “Your Guide to Bringing Strategic Leadership to Life, Part 3.” While much of our writing focused on what happens during a learning experience, this piece zoomed in on what happens after—when leaders return to real work and the initial excitement meets operational reality. It underscored that lasting behavior change depends on three things: turning decisions into insights, applying learning to real work, and reinforcing key ideas through structures like challenge circles, microlearning, and nudges. The message is that development only matters if it survives the day-to-day.
And this theme extended beyond our own blog. Krista Campbell’s piece in Training Magazine on designing participant-centric leadership development programs underscored the same idea: The experiences that stick are the ones built around real decisions, real practice, and real ownership. And in the September issue of TD Magazine, Bethany Bremer spotlighted the facilitator practices that make those experiences work — a members-only read online, but very much part of what we were thinking about this year.
Looking Ahead to 2026
If we had to sum up 2025’s leadership questions in one sentence, it might be this:
How do I lead thoughtfully in a world that keeps speeding up?
Clarity in complexity, thoughtful engagement with AI, caring for people and performance, owning development, and choosing learning that actually sticks: These aren’t going away in 2026. If anything, they’ll intensify.
Our commitment, as we head into a new year (and our 25th as a company), is to keep writing, designing, and partnering around the questions that matter most, the ones that show up in real decisions, real trade-offs, and real conversations.
If one of these questions is especially alive for you or your organization right now, we’d love to keep the conversation going. The questions leaders are asking are rarely simple, but they’re almost always worth staying with.
