Every Major Report in 2026 Diagnosed the Same Leadership Deficit. None of Them Gave the Answer.

Open the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026, PwC's Global CEO Survey, Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends, Korn Ferry's CEO & Board Survey, and McKinsey's State of Organizations - five separate research houses, five separate methodologies - and you land on the same conclusion five times over. Boards are not short of information about the problem. Geoeconomic confrontation is now a named top-tier global risk. 42% of CEOs call keeping pace with technology their biggest concern, and 56% say AI has produced no measurable financial benefit yet. 85% of leaders call adaptability critical - 7% believe they're actually building it. Half of boards started succession planning too late last time they changed CEOs, and only 15% think they did a strong job preparing a first-time CEO for the seat.

Five reports. One diagnosis. Zero of them hand a board a way to find out whether the leaders already in the room can actually do the thing being asked of them. Leadership Capital Group built Decision Readiness - a book, ten workbooks, and four workshops - to be the answer none of those five reports gave.

That gap is not an accident. A market-wide diagnosis is a research product - it tells an industry what's wrong so consultants, advisors, and search firms have something to talk about. It was never designed to test one specific board, in one specific company, against one specific decision. Diagnosis and readiness are different products, and most of what gets published this year is the former.

What Decision Readiness actually is

Decision Readiness starts from a simple observation: analysis is cheap and getting cheaper. Data, benchmarking, best-practice frameworks, AI-generated scenario models - any board can buy or generate all of it in an afternoon. What's expensive, and what none of that analysis substitutes for, is judgement: the act of actually deciding, under real uncertainty, and then being accountable for what happens next.

Most governance literature - and most board evaluation - still measures the first layer: does the board have the right process, the right committees, the right information flow. That's necessary, but it's not the same question as whether the board is ready to decide when the moment actually arrives. Decision Readiness is built as a two-layer model precisely to separate these: Layer 1 is process - the governance machinery every serious board already has. Layer 2 is domain intelligence - the specific, tested judgement a board needs in the areas where today's disruption actually concentrates: geopolitics, AI investment, cyber resilience, succession, execution. A board can score well on Layer 1 and still fail completely at Layer 2 the first time a real decision under pressure arrives. That gap - not a process failure, but a readiness failure - is what the five reports above are all describing without naming.

Garry Veale, board chair of a UK software company owned by BlackRock, put it more directly after reading the book than we could have ourselves:

“I've spent much of my career around boards and leadership teams where the problem was rarely a shortage of information, intelligence, or good intentions. The real challenge was making the decision - and then turning that decision into action. That's what I like about Decision Readiness. [It] moves the conversation beyond governance as process and towards the question that really matters: are we ready to decide? The right evidence. The right challenge. Clear ownership. And the confidence to act - then inspect execution against what was agreed. In a business environment where boards are being asked to make bigger decisions, faster and with less certainty, Decision Readiness is a timely and practical contribution to better decision-making.”

That's the whole framework in one paragraph, from someone who has no reason to say it except that it matched what he'd actually lived through.

The nine workbooks - what each one is actually for

The book sets out the framework. The nine workbooks are where a specific board or a specific leader tests it against their own reality. Each one works two ways: as a collective diagnostic a board runs on itself, and as a personal tool an individual executive uses before they ever bring a decision into the room.

AI Investment - For the board: a structured way to evaluate an AI investment case on evidence rather than vendor momentum or internal hype - directly answering the gap PwC found, where 56% of CEOs report no measurable financial return yet. For the individual: gives an executive building or reviewing an AI business case a framework to pressure-test it before it reaches the board, rather than defending it after the fact.

Cyber Security (with an integrated NIS2 and Minimum Viable Company module) - For the board: meets the NIS2 director-liability requirement directly and forces the specific decision MVC is built around - which minimum version of the company must survive if the primary systems go dark and when you are attacked by yourself in the form of a deepfake attack with video and voice showing your leadership team. For the individual: gives a director personal clarity on exactly what they are now legally and practically accountable for, rather than assuming IT has it covered.

Geopolitical Risk - For the board: builds the embedded geopolitical intelligence layer the Global Board Survey 2026 found missing from most boards, even though political tension already ranks among their top external concerns. For the individual: equips an executive to bring structured geopolitical judgement into one specific decision - a supply chain call, a market entry, a resourcing choice - instead of generalised awareness that never gets applied.

Succession & Talent - For the board: a structured succession timeline and CEO-Strategy Fit criteria, addressing Korn Ferry's finding that half of boards start succession planning too late. For the individual: lets a future CEO candidate test whether they fit the strategy the board actually needs executed next - not just the job description of the role they're chasing.

The Resilient Company - For the board: the collective framework for deciding what must keep standing when the primary systems fail, rather than discovering the answer during the incident. For the individual: a personal playbook for identifying the single points of failure sitting inside one's own area of responsibility before someone else finds them first.

Stakeholder Blindness - For the board: exposes where customer, market and stakeholder reality is being filtered out before it reaches the boardroom, so the board is validating management's assumptions rather than testing them. For the individual: a check an executive can run on their own thinking before they present it - whose reality is this decision actually built on?

The Missing Decision - For the board: surfaces the decisions a board assumes were made but that, on inspection, never actually were - a specific and uncomfortable diagnostic. For the individual: helps an executive notice when they're operating on an assumed mandate rather than an actual one, before it becomes their problem to explain.

The Fundable Company - For the board: the framework for staying genuinely investable - what a PE or VC investor is actually testing for, beyond the pitch deck. For the individual: gives a CEO or CFO a due-diligence-ready narrative ready before the capital raise starts, not assembled under pressure once it has.

Execution Tax - For the board: quantifies, with an accompanying diagnostic tool, the hidden cost of decisions that get made but never properly executed - the second half of Garry's endorsement in practice: ownership followed by inspecting execution against what was agreed. For the individual: shows an executive precisely where their own decisions are leaking value between being made and being done.

And the tenth: The Future CEO

The nine workbooks above are built for the board and the executive already in the room, working on the decision in front of them today. The tenth workbook exists for someone who isn't in that room yet - the leader who wants to be the strongest possible candidate for it.

This is the workbook that speaks most directly to what executive search firms are actually asking for right now, even when they don't call it this. Every search brief eventually comes down to the same test: not just whether a candidate has the right track record on paper, but whether they can sit in front of a board and answer, under real scrutiny, whether they're ready to decide. The Future CEO workbook is built around that exact test - seven domains covering the judgement a modern CEO candidate is actually measured against: trust as the foundation everything else depends on, geopolitical judgement, supply chain resilience, technological judgement, sustainability as business logic, complexity tolerance, and stakeholder leadership.

It doesn't promise every reader the same outcome, because that isn't how the CEO market works. A candidate's background, sector experience, and track record determine what type and size of company they're realistically a candidate for - a workbook can't and shouldn't pretend otherwise. What it can do, and what it's built to do, is show a candidate exactly where they stand across all seven domains before a board or a search firm does it for them: two self-scored tests, one at knowledge level and a harder one at judgement level, so the reader sees precisely which domains are already board-ready and which still need work - and can close that gap on their own terms, months or years before the search call comes, not during it.

That's the same readiness question every one of the five reports at the start of this piece is circling - geopolitics, AI, succession - but asked at the level of one person's career instead of one board's process.

Ten workbooks now, one book - peer-reviewed through four external reviewers across three countries, built on the same evidence base the industry's own research houses are now citing - and four workshops: NIS2, Minimum Viable Company, Geo-Politics, AI-Investment, where a board or a candidate rehearses the decision under pressure, rather than reading a case study about someone else's.

Here's the sharper version of the question every one of those five reports is circling, but none of them will actually make you answer: not “is the leadership deficit real” - every research house in the industry already agrees it is - but “have you tested whether your own boardroom, or your own candidacy, has it.” Nobody sells you that test off a shelf. You have to run it.

That's what Decision Readiness is for.