CEO succession: Avoiding the unanticipated Domino Effect

In a world where transformation often feels complex and distant, real progress is often sparked at the community level, through leaders who create change from within.

In Senegal, a partnership between BTS Spark and Tostan, a nonprofit dedicated to community-led development across Africa, is bringing this idea to life. It’s a reminder that sustainable leadership isn’t built by imposing new systems. It grows when people are equipped to lead themselves.

A ground-up approach to lasting change

Since 1991, Tostan—whose name means "breakthrough" in Wolof—has partnered with rural African communities to advance human rights, health, literacy, and economic development. Its Community Empowerment Program (CEP) weaves together practical knowledge and human rights education, enabling communities to define and pursue their own visions of progress.

Across eight countries and more than five million lives, Tostan’s approach has led to deep-rooted changes, including the voluntary abandonment of harmful traditional practices. Not by directive, but by choice.

It’s an approach that shows leadership capacity isn’t something to be delivered from outside. It’s something to be nurtured from within.

Meeting communities where they are

In 2024, BTS Spark deepened its collaboration with Tostan through an in-person leadership workshop, led by a BTS Spark consultant, following a year of virtual engagement.

The visit coincided with a leadership transition at the executive level—a pivotal moment requiring clarity, continuity, and resilience. Through targeted coaching and workshops, BTS Spark worked alongside Tostan’s leaders to support the transition and strengthen leadership capacity at every level of the organization.

The focus wasn’t on delivering a model. It was on listening, amplifying existing strengths, and equipping leaders to navigate complexity with confidence.

Practical tools for complex challenges

As part of the ongoing collaboration, BTS Spark also provided custom-designed micro-simulations focused on sectors vital to community sustainability: climate resilience, microfinance, and agriculture.

These micro-sims offer leaders a chance to engage with real-world decision-making challenges in a safe, practical environment—an approach that mirrors how leadership development increasingly happens: not through theory alone, but through repeated, real-world application.

It’s a reminder that growth is rarely linear. It’s built through practice, reflection, and adaptation over time.

Building leadership that endures

The work between BTS Spark and Tostan reflects a broader truth:

Leadership isn’t confined to titles, industries, or regions. It emerges where people are given the tools, trust, and space to act.

Sustainable change, whether in communities or organizations, happens when leadership capacity is strengthened closest to where challenges are lived every day.

The partnership also highlights the power of investing in local capability: focusing on what’s already working, building resilience from within, and preparing leaders not just to meet today’s challenges, but to shape tomorrow’s opportunities.

Moving forward: Scaling with purpose

The work in Senegal is continuing to evolve. BTS Spark and Tostan are exploring ways to extend leadership development to more communities, deepen their impact, and continue supporting transformation through shared expertise and partnership.

It’s a model rooted in respect, collaboration, and the belief that leadership is most powerful when it reflects the realities and aspirations of the people closest to the work.

The accelerating pace of change in the modern workplace has necessitated a proactive approach to envisioning the future and what will be required to support organizations as they evolve and adapt.

To advance the conversation, we recently facilitated a future-storming session to reimagine the future of work and talent strategy.

Future-storming is the process of identifying risks and trends that might affect your business or industry vertical, combining them in new ways, and thinking of solutions to mitigate these risks. The ambition? To break the chains of traditional thought, sparking insights into the evolving domain of talent strategy.

Here are five transformative themes that surfaced during the session:

1. Fluidity of talent:

Gone are the days when “talent” described a fixed set of competencies an individual brought to the table. In today’s world, talent is an amalgamation of adaptability, resilience, and the capability to evolve. AI and automation, while replacing routine tasks, can't replace the human capacity to grow, reimagine, and pivot.

The traditional talent pool, defined by rigid skill sets, is making way for a reservoir of potential. It's about harnessing the innate human ability to unlearn, relearn, and traverse uncharted territories. Recognizing this fluid nature of talent can redefine how organizations recruit, retain, and nurture their human capital. The future will prize the ability to learn and relearn, shifting from fixed competencies to a reservoir of ever-evolving potential.

2. Skill evolution, continuous, embedded learning:

The gig economy drives continuous learning, demanding flexibility and growth. The concept of learning in organizations is evolving beyond formal training modules. Today's employees are in a perpetual state of growth, thanks to digital platforms, cross-cultural collaborations, and the changing demands of their roles.

No longer can learning be a one-off event. It must be seen as a journey where every experience, every interaction, and even every failure is an opportunity to grow. This shift to continuous learning also means embracing failures as valuable lessons, promoting a culture of curiosity, and embedding learning in everyday tasks. Organizations that foster curiosity and value each failure as a learning opportunity will lead the way. The pathway to career progression is increasingly carved by demonstrable capabilities.

3. Culture, diversity, and the rich tapestry of learning:

Cultural diversity isn't just a buzzword; it's an untapped treasure for organizational growth. There is a burgeoning global talent landscape with increased cultural exposure which fosters innovation and holistic problem solving. Diverse teams, with their unique experiences and backgrounds, bring varied problem-solving methodologies, fresh perspectives, and richer insights, serving as an invaluable asset for organizational growth.

These multi-cultural interactions and experiences act as opportunities for informal learning, introducing employees to different ways of thinking and innovative solutions. Encouraging such interactions not only fosters a sense of inclusivity but also ensures a holistic organizational growth trajectory.

4. Embracing the tech-human synergy:

The technological renaissance envisages a world where computers and robots assume many of our current roles, from documentation to Q&A. The emerging synthesis of technology and biology, including embedded tech and wearables, offers insights, from employee well-being to real-time emotional feedback.

While technological advancements promise efficiency and scalability, the human element's value remains unmatched. The blend of technology with human intuition, creativity, and empathy is the key to future success. The ideal modern professional is one who not only leverages technology but also understands its boundaries, ensuring that technology serves humanity and not the other way around. While technology offers efficiency, the human touch provides empathy, intuition, and creativity.

With advancements come ethical considerations, especially with AI and machine learning. Balancing technological ability with an ethical foundation ensures that organizations remain not just profitable, but also principled.

5. The subtle art of leadership:

Work will undergo an existential reevaluation. The rise of decentralized leadership, the emphasis on enriching organizational culture, and a holistic approach to talent assessment will redefine organizations. With flattened organizational structures, fostering trust and embracing entrepreneurialism are necessities. Leaders will be more focused on collaboration, understanding, and guidance. In this landscape, leadership also means being tech-savvy, yet understanding the nuances of human emotion is also requisite. It's about removing barriers, and being a facilitator and mentor.

Furthermore, as work boundaries blur, leaders need to be agile, adaptive, and always ready to guide their teams through tumultuous waters. The responsibility is to create environments where employees feel empowered, engaged, and eager to contribute.

Reflections

The future-storming session offered a blueprint for navigating the complex terrains of the talent landscape of tomorrow. The future of talent and learning is unfolding, and through sessions like these, we aim to empower leaders to be the sculptors of that future.

Collins, L., Hartog, S., Werder, C. (2023). Future Storming: Reimagining Talent Strategy for Today. Delivered at the Conference for Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Boston, MA.

Are you in a leadership rut?

It’s a hard question to answer because of the nature of ruts. You often don’t realize you are in one until you’re out of it. This is particularly true for senior leaders, who have demanding schedules and packed calendars, which may further delay the realization of being in a rut: You’re just too busy to notice.

Why is this a problem? For leaders, the risks of being in a rut extend beyond being caught in a boring routine or stuck in an emotional funk. Left unchecked, company innovation and performance suffers, engagement and morale may drop, and good talent leaves when leaders and teams fall into ruts. Leadership ruts are serious business, but what makes them hard to see is that the signs often appear in small ways. How do you know if a rut is sneaking up on you? Here are a few indications.

1. No bright spots on the calendar. Recently, I asked a client, “What are you looking forward to on your calendar?” There was a long pause. He replied, “Not much.”  If this feels like you, it’s an important area to explore, because calendars aren’t just timetables, they mirror how we spend our days. So, take a few minutes to review your calendar on a regular basis. Too many days in a row without bright spots has an impact. Over time, it can hurt our motivation, engagement, creativity, and we may not even realize it is happening to us. Think about it this way. Are you really at your best at meetings you don’t look forward to? Eventually, too many of those impact a leader’s performance in all kinds of ways.
   
   How to address: Recognize that a great calendar won’t just happen by itself. It’s easy to get caught into a trap of thinking that we don’t have control over our calendars or buy into the old story that work shouldn’t be about fun. As good as you are, you’ll be even better if you have days to look forward to and a calendar that energizes you, so commit to making small improvements in your calendar (more bright spots and fewer meetings you dread) and you’ll yield instant results.
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2. Too much of the same. Being in the same role for a while isn’t necessarily a sign you’re in a leadership rut, so the caveat here is that “it depends.” If you’re in the type of company where most people advance or move into different roles every 18-24 months and you haven’t, it’s an area to explore. While you’re at it, consider other aspects of your work that haven’t changed in a while, whether it’s the people on your team, the work you’re engaged in, or the number of new situations or people you’ve encountered. This can lead to a blind spot buildup and dull our ability to stay fresh, embrace change, or expose ourselves to diverse people and experiences that enable us to think differently.
   
   How to address: Deliberately force yourself to mix it up, and this is particularly true if you’ve worked at the same company for most of your career. Raise your hand to do something new on a regular basis that is a stretch for you. Over the years, I’ve had clients do everything from speaking at a major client event, to living overseas, to attending a Tony Robbins seminar and walking over hot coals. This is also a time when leaders engage a coach or join groups of other like-minded leaders to get exposed to new ideas. Whatever you choose, put it on your calendar so you know it will happen. A few small tweaks can create major change and transformation.
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3. You’ve stopped dreaming big for yourself. Being in a leadership rut can often start from a place of good intentions. Perhaps you’ve been leading through a challenging time and you’ve been focused on getting through the issues at hand. The question to ask yourself is when are you not in a period like this?  If it’s always code red, all the time, it’s easy to stay in a permanent state of firefighting. This produces the worst kind of leadership rut, where we are never able to get beyond the urgent and tackle the important, and it can lead us to some dark nights of the soul, where we wake up, 10, 20 years later and regret not tending to our longer-term goals, hopes, and visions for our own lives.
   
   How to address: Make daydreaming as important and strategic an activity as any other high priority in your life and treat it seriously. Set aside time to sit in your favorite chair in a quiet corner of the house with your pen and notebook and answer some simple questions for yourself, like, “What do I dream about?” or “What do I want to do that I haven’t done yet?” Daydreaming is about unfiltered, unedited thinking, and it is where some of the best ideas for your life and work can happen. The first few times you do this, you may feel uninspired or cringe at the word ‘daydreaming.’ Forget about all of that and remind yourself it is what the most enlightened, productive leaders do to get even better.
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Falling into a rut can start off innocently, like always going to the same restaurant and ordering the same thing off the menu. In leadership, it’s risky, because it limits our ability to be everything we can be for our organizations, our teams, and ourselves. Toughest of all is the fact that other people may recognize we’re in a rut long before we do. The good news is that we can address this with a few simple changes, and when we do, leadership becomes vibrant, energizing, and returns to technicolor again.

Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.

In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.

Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.

Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.

Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.

But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.

Why judgment matters more than ever

Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.

If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.

What organizations must do

To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:

• Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.

• Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.

• Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.

• Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.

What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.

P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.

Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.

Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.

BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.

“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”

“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.

Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.

The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.

BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.

For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com

Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19

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Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.

When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.