Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD), Case Study

Helping Boards See What Today’s CEOs Weren’t Hired to Handle

The Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) brought Morris in not once, but twice first for a closed-door leadership foresight workshop in Sydney, and later as a keynote panellist for their Not-for-Profit leadership series in Melbourne.

At the workshop, Morris worked with senior AICD members on strategic scenarios shaping the future of directorship itself — using frameworks from “The Future Revisited” and his own foresight methodologies to help boards imagine how governance, regulation, stakeholder accountability, and emerging tech would transform their role.

Years later, they invited him back to help boards rethink the CEO of the future. What skills? What worldview? What ethical resilience? Morris brought the provocation: “Are you hiring people who can lead, or people who can administrate complexity that’s already obsolete?”

From AI fluency to cross-sector leadership design, Morris gave directors new lenses to evaluate what their organisations and their people need next.

Shift: From traditional succession planning to strategic talent foresight helping directors prepare for challenges no CEO was hired to face.

The result?: Enduring influence on AICD’s leadership development conversations, with Morris’s provocations echoed in board education, event strategy, and policy foresight ever since.