Caroline Stokes joined me from a 34-degree-Celsius London — which converts to precisely “a bajillion Fahrenheit,” she offered. Ducking between sessions at London Climate Week and others on the troubling conditions in the MENA region, she revealed that her brain may have been starting to slow in the heat.
She was lucid as can be in my experience, but the heat felt like exactly the right weather for her verdict on the old way of leading. It isn’t dead, she says. It’s “dead dead.”
Caroline is an executive coach and leadership strategist, a former Sony executive who helped launch PlayStation, and the author of AfterShock to 2030, a guide for CEOs navigating the collision of AI, climate, and societal upheaval. The book exists, on purpose, only as an ebook and audiobook — she refused to print a single copy, not even one for the shelf, because she wasn’t willing to fell a tree in order to tell leaders to tread more lightly. That decision turns out to be the whole philosophy in miniature, and we’ll come back to it.
“Dead dead” is both an unequivocal pronouncement of death, and good news, and the good news is why I invited Caroline during Optimism month.
The funeral is for performative leadership: announcing DEI or sustainability initiatives that never happen, throwing-someone-under-the-bus to survive to the next earnings call.
And she is clear that this funeral will provoke real grief. Letting go of a hard-won persona hurts, and a lot of us are grieving right now, about climate, about AI, about systems shifting under our feet.
But Caroline’s optimism is not the naive, click your ruby slippers kind. It’s a rigorous practice: of looking squarely at what’s broken and then daring to picture — and actively build — something better.
Once you stop and let go of what no longer serves, she says, it “opens up all this energy and creativity and joy” to get through. That’s the whole reason optimism isn’t a waste of time: it’s how you find the ways through.
On the far side of the grief, you finally get to turn around and ask: I don’t think that system worked very well — look what it did to the planet, and to our health — so what do I want to do differently?
Her answer begins with a single move, and she has the receipt. In a Waitrose queue in London, a 26-year-old fellow shopper started telling her how frightened he was: AI, the polycrisis, a future he couldn’t picture.
Caroline, being a coach, asked questions instead of nodding along. Ten minutes later, groceries melting in the heat, she gave him the only prescription she had time for. Stop. Just stop. (Her four-step S-T-O-P framework is fleshed out in the book.)
Naturally, she had me at Stop. But stopping, in her hands, isn’t despair or doom-scrolling. It’s how you clear enough room to find the one true next step.
She’s watched how fast helplessness curdles into a spiral, and how reliably a single concrete thing to do, one person doing the real work to follow, pulls a person back out. Hope, it turns out, is mostly a matter of knowing where to look.
What’s rare in her work is that she holds real urgency without the breathlessness. In her workshops she lays the three big problems on the table — AI, climate, and the societal one, meaning how we actually treat people — and asks which leaders want to tackle first. Almost everyone lunges for AI, because it feels like the existential threat to them, while climate, the larger threat, that doesn’t have a quick fix or hack, remains the thirsty elephant in the room.
Then we talked about the most potent line I’ve read in her work: believing we have certainty right now is a form of gaslighting — even self-abuse.
She is pointing out the moral injury caused by the exhausting performance of certainty: the leader projecting total command to a board, a team, themselves, the way a sports commentator narrates inevitability over a match nobody can actually call. “Pure acting,” she said.
The unlock is permission to stop acting. To say out loud, we don’t know yet, let’s explore the scenarios and weigh the options, and then commit and move. Anyone smart already knows they aren’t certain.
Subtracting the pretense is what frees the energy to lead. And, she points out, it’s exactly what moves you from the funeral to the optimism. Drop the performance of knowing, and you’re suddenly free to explore the futures actually worth building toward.
Underneath all of it sits the question she now runs everything through: what are you powering? She caught it off a sticker at a tech conference and promptly audited her whole life with it: how she communicates, what she eats, which clients she takes, and, yes, how she publishes.
She’s quick to add that this is about least harm, not purity. We can’t exist at zero impact, so the move is to choose consciously and drop the shame: the kayak instead of the gas-powered boat, the train instead of a gas-guzzling V8, the in-person meeting that genuinely shifts an organization instead of a guilt-tinged flight. “Shame is a waste of energy,” she said — which longtime readers will hear as a cousin of what Deb Shine Valentine told us about harsh self-criticism being too expensive to afford.
My favorite moment was watching one small decision bloom into a whole system. Caroline wants to be on the water; she won’t add carbon; she’s also, like a lot of us, a little lonely. The answer wasn’t sacrifice — it was a two-person kayak with a girlfriend. Me, on the water. World, no fuel. We, real time with someone she loves. Stop long enough, and the thing you want, the people you love, and the world you’re trying to protect quit competing and start cooperating. That’s the 3D, in one boat.
I closed the way I always do, asking for one subtractive move to get someone where they want to be a year from now. Hers: notice the thing that nags at you (signals: irritation, curiosity, even envy) and stop long enough to actually look at it.
Then take one step toward it, and keep going. The noticing is the hinge. You can’t subtract what you won’t slow down to see, and you can’t build a future you won’t let yourself picture. That picturing is exactly the role of optimism.
Watch the full conversation above for the parts I couldn’t fit — the World Cup commentary as a master class in faked certainty, Nvidia’s “mission is the boss” mantra, and the running bit where Caroline and I keep telling each other we’re right.
Then find her work and AfterShock to 2030 (ebook or Audible — no trees harmed) at theforward.co.
Stop torturing yourself by pretending to have certainty. Drop the shame about the inevitable harm your footprint has on this planet, and focus on amplifying the good you do to outrun it. And keep on rollin’,
Nell
