Hello, I'm so happy to see you here!

At first glance, this looks like an old map of the world. It isn't. It is an 18th-century map of the Bering Strait, showing Siberia on one side and North America on the other. But what makes it fascinating isn't what it gets right : it's what it gets wrong. Alaska is oddly shaped, Canada is split by an imaginary sea route, and mythical lands and peoples appear where knowledge ran out. Like every map, it reflects the best understanding of its time rather than reality itself. And that's precisely what makes it such a powerful metaphor for how we navigate the world today.

Maps can be confidently wrong. But the unknown can also be something you simply surrender to, as I was reminded two weeks ago.

Before we dive into this week's Wide Angle, a small evolution.

When I started this newsletter, I was trying to answer the question so many people in this field ask: how do we navigate the transition? So I wrote about frameworks, strategy, and the tools organisations use to adapt. I even added a job board, thinking this community might be looking for opportunities as much as ideas.

But over the past weeks, I noticed something. The conversations that stayed with you were never about frameworks. They were about the deeper question underneath them.

That is where Wide Angle is heading. Less reporting on sustainability, more exploring the invisible systems that shape our decisions. More "here is a different way of seeing."

So this week I have replaced the job board ( that no one was clicking on anyway and that was taking so much time) with something else: a question designed to make you think for yourself, especially in the era of AI. I hope you like it!

Now, let's begin.

Two weeks ago, my husband told me we were invited to a gig the following evening.

The next day at 6pm, we still had no information and no tickets. I had no idea what we were going to, so I simply didn't get dressed.

At 9.30pm, the phone rang. "We're picking you up in front of your house in ten minutes."

My husband and I looked at each other, then bolted for the bedroom. Ten minutes later we were in a car, being introduced to a colleague of his.

"I needed to pick you up. It's easier for the VIP entrance."

Another lost look at my husband. He shrugged.

When we arrived, cars were everywhere, roads were blocked, and security checked our vehicle three times.

"Where are we?" I whispered.

"No idea," he whispered back.

We were escorted to the front rows of an ancient Roman theatre, filled with 2,500 people. The music started. The youyous rose around us and I joined in (of course, I did!). Someone placed a necklace of jasmine around my neck.

Three hours of laughter, music, and dancing! Apparently some people wait all year for this concert.

We came home smiling and exhausted, and released the most flexible Colombian nanny this Earth has ever produced.

As I fell asleep, I thought: “Alix, you are so often a control freak. And today it felt wonderful not to know.”

But here is what I realised afterwards, and why I am telling you this.

That uncertainty was delicious because nothing was riding on it. I had no plan to be wrong about, no forecast to defend, no decision resting on knowing where I was going. I could simply be carried.

Organisations do not have that luxury. They have plans. They have models, forecasts, risk registers, five year projections. And so when they encounter the unknown, they do not experience it as an open evening in Tunis. They experience it as vertigo, and they name it "an uncertain world."

But uncertainty is not always a property of the world. Very often it is a symptom of something else: the instruments we use to understand reality are no longer calibrated for the reality we are living in.

I. DEEP ANALYSIS

Every organisation has instruments: risk registers, five-year forecasts, scenario models, investment assumptions, climate projections, insurance models. They exist for a good reason. They turn complexity into something we can act on. But every instrument carries a hidden assumption: that the future will stay similar enough to the past for the measurement to keep meaning something. And that assumption is breaking.

The problem is not that our models are wrong. It is that we keep asking them questions they were never designed to answer. A thermometer does not fail because it cannot measure the temperature of the ocean. It fails because someone carried it into the wrong environment. The same is true of most of the systems we trust to make decisions. The issue is not uncertainty. The issue is calibration.

When the world moves faster than the model

For decades, our most important systems were built on an idea called stationarity: the belief that the patterns of the past are a reliable guide to the future. Climate models, insurance pricing, financial risk, infrastructure planning, agricultural forecasts, they all carry some version of the same assumption: tomorrow will look enough like yesterday. For a long time, that was not unreasonable. But we have entered a different era. The world is now moving faster than many of our instruments can update. And when the landscape changes but the map does not, the problem is not the traveller. It is the map.

One of the most dangerous things about an outdated instrument is that it does not stop working loudly. It keeps producing numbers, generating charts, looking scientific. A broken compass that spins wildly is easy to distrust. A compass that points confidently in the wrong direction can carry you very far from where you meant to go.

Organisations are rarely destroyed because they had no information. They are destroyed because they trusted information that looked more precise than it really was. A number with two decimals feels like knowledge. But precision and accuracy are not the same thing, and a forecast can be perfectly precise and completely wrong. The question a leader should ask is not “how confident is this number?” It is “does this instrument really support me in a world that changed?”

Three questions to audit your instruments

What world was this instrument built for? Every model contains a hidden version of reality: a climate baseline, an economic assumption, a political context. Name the conditions it assumed would stay stable, then ask whether they still hold.

How often does it fail, and by how much? Most organisations track whether a project shipped or revenue grew. Few track how wrong their forecasts usually are. Calibration is not certainty; it is knowing the size of your own uncertainty.

Are we optimising for the most likely future, or the most resilient one? In a stable world, optimising for the expected case makes sense. In a volatile one, it is a trap. The best decisions are rarely the ones that win in a single predicted future; they are the ones that stay reasonable across many.

What the best organisations do instead

The organisations that survive a shock are rarely the ones that predicted it. They are the ones that noticed the change earlier and were built to bend rather than break. Three shifts make the difference: from prediction to detection, from optimisation to robustness, from confidence to calibration. Stop rewarding the leader who sounds certain; start trusting the one who says “I don’t know yet, but here is how we will find out.”

The ones who redrew the map

The Netherlands is the cleanest example. For centuries the Dutch fought the sea with higher and higher walls, an instrument built on one belief: keep the water out. Then, after the floods, they changed the question. Room for the River let water in on purpose, giving rivers space to flood where it did least harm. Same country, same water, a completely different map. They stopped asking “how do we hold the line?” and started asking “how do we live with what is coming?”

Netflix did the same to itself. Its instrument said the business was mailing DVDs, and the numbers looked healthy. Rather than defend that map, it declared the DVD dead while it was still profitable and rebuilt around streaming. Blockbuster kept reading the old dashboard, confidently, right up to the end. The difference was never information. Both could see the same trend. The difference was the willingness to admit the map was out of date.

The Wide Angle

A model is not the world. A forecast is not the future. A measurement is not the thing being measured. Every instrument is a conversation between humans and reality, and when reality changes, the conversation has to change too. The most resilient organisations will not be the ones that eliminate uncertainty. They will be the ones that notice, early and without flinching, when their way of seeing has gone out of date, and have the courage to redraw the map.

That is the wide angle. That is the view leaders need now.

This week’s skill: learn to lead through change and uncertainty, from the people who study it. I’ll take it myself, before I start another diploma in Harvard in August.

Harvard Business Review’s Navigate Change and Uncertainty course on Coursera turns “staying calm when the map breaks” into a trainable set of habits.

It is short, practical, and built around exactly the shifts in this issue: reading weak signals early, making decisions when you cannot know the outcome, and leading a team through ambiguity without faking certainty.

One honest note: the link below is an affiliate link, so if you take the course, a small share supports Wide Angle at no extra cost to you.

→ Enroll here

Three stories, one thread: the institutions whose job is to measure risk are admitting, out loud, that yesterday’s instruments are not enough for tomorrow’s world.

For decades a central bank published one main projection of where the economy was heading. Under recent shocks, several have stopped. They now communicate through scenarios instead of a single expected path, on the grounds that a false sense of precision is more dangerous than admitting uncertainty. When the institutions built entirely around forecasting decide a single confident number is misleading, the lesson travels straight to your own five-year plan.

→ Read more here

Here is what changed. In 2024, for the first time in recorded history, the planet spent a full year more than 1.5 °C hotter than the pre-industrial era. That is not just a symbolic threshold. Climate models are built by testing them against the past: we feed them decades of real temperatures, rainfall and storms, and we trust them because they can reproduce a world we have already measured. But the climate is now generating conditions that never appear in that historical record. So the models are increasingly being asked to describe a world they were never tested on, which means they are extrapolating rather than recognising, and a model can be confidently wrong about a climate it has never observed. The news is not "the climate is warming." The news is that we have now crossed out of the range our main forecasting tools were calibrated on, and every decision built on them (crop insurance, hydropower planning, city flood defences) quietly inherits that blind spot.

→ Read more here

If Wide Angle adds value to your week, forward it to one colleague or friend in sustainability, climate, strategy, or leadership. Every new reader helps grow this community of big-picture thinkers.

→ Share

Something new is coming!

Every week I receive messages from people who want to work in international climate and ocean governance but don't know how the system works. Where the doors are. Who actually decides. How the money flows. What a winning CV looks like. Why their applications disappear into the void.

I have spent twenty years inside that system. I have decided to open it up.

I am building The Inside Track: a members-only community where I share everything I know about how to build a career in this sector. Weekly deep dives into how international institutions really recruit. Real tender analysis. Salary data nobody publishes. A 7-module career guide. And a private forum of professionals navigating the same path.

It launches in the coming weeks. If you want early access, reply to this email with "Inside Track" and I will add you to the list. First members will get founding member pricing.

I’m so excited!

I keep a limited number of engagements per year, by design.

Signature Keynote : a 90-minute talk built around "How to Turn Chaos into Opportunity," for organisations that need their leadership to think differently about resilience before the next disruption arrives. Watch my Tedx here

Signature Workshop : a half-day working session for teams that need to leave with an actual plan, not just a framework: who owns what, which channel to use, how the coalition survives past launch.

Bespoke Programme (custom) : for organisations going deeper, over multiple modules.

Available in English and French. International.

or write to me [email protected]

Why this matters:

we are moving into a world where climate, geopolitics, energy, and natural resources are no longer separate topics. They are one system. My work is to help people read that system more clearly and make better decisions inside it.

See you next week!

Alix

♻️ Share this to inspire your network.

Wide Angle is built on Beehiiv, the newsletter platform designed for growth. Creators who sign up through my referral link receive a 30-day free trial and 20% off for 3 months.