Mentorship helps people grow. Sponsorship brings influence to bear on opportunity. Leadership investment becomes more meaningful when an organisation can see how both operate, and can account for who gains access to the work through which future leaders become known.
We spend endless hours debating whether AI will eventually outsmart humanity, overtake us, displace the workforce, or trigger an existential crisis. But while we stare at the distant horizon waiting for superintelligence, a quieter, far more immediate event is unfolding directly on our screens. Our own minds could start to atrophy
Reclaiming Collective Intelligence
In Reclaiming Collective Intelligence, we argued that humanity’s survival depends on “improving our ability to improve”. Women’s roles as caregivers, organisers, and connectors place them at the heart of this process. Yet their intelligence has been systematically undervalued. Only half of women receive official disaster warnings compared to over 70% of men. Still, when disaster strikes, women are often the ones who mobilise, improvise, and stabilise. They are the living repositories of “what works.”
We’re meeting Jacqui Cooper, an Australian freestyle skier, mother, and entrepreneur, who invites us to rethink our relationship with performance.
By every metric the researchers examined, parents lag behind their childless peers, but mothers are affected far more adversely. The numbers don’t lie—not exactly. There is an obvious correlation between having children and the death of what could otherwise have been an uninterrupted, ambitious academic career.
One of the least recognised patterns in executive transition is that many high-performing women do not slow down when uncertainty increases. They accelerate.
From the outside, this often looks admirable. They become more proactive, more productive, more visible, more responsive, and even more committed to proving their value. Their LinkedIn becomes sharper. Their networking intensifies. Their positioning becomes increasingly refined. New certifications appear. More conversations are initiated. More effort is invested into remaining relevant, strategic, and in motion.
Yet underneath all of that activity, something very different is often happening internally.
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