As we approach the end of the first quarter of 2026, the contours of the year are coming into focus—not in a set of clear priorities, but as a collection of ongoing micro-adjustments and evolving constraints.

In this environment, leadership is less about resolution and more about capacity: creating space to make sense of what’s emerging, take meaningful steps without full information, and face the emotional realities of change.

In this issue, we share what we’re seeing from organizations and individuals working to build that capacity.

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Content Round-up: Organizations & Leadership

In our most recent webinar, Hudson CEO Michael Hudson sat down with Timmi Zalatoris, CHRO at Sprouts Farmers Market, and Leah Potkin, Principal Leadership Development Partner at HubSpot, to explore what organizations are getting right (and wrong) about manager development.

Timmi explained that store managers at Sprouts rely on coaching skills to thrive in one of the most complex roles in the organization. In order to meet the operational demands of a high-volume retail environment while leading a team that represents Sprouts’ culture where it matters most for the bottom line, these managers need to be able to develop their people to embody the organization’s priorities and values without adding incremental work.

Meanwhile, Leah described managers in tech as reaching the limits of their capacity for uncertainty. The answer, as Leah put it, is to develop a “coaching ecosystem” that builds capacity on an ongoing basis, rather than a one-and-done intervention.

Access the recording here.

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Lessons From the Field

In a recent closed-door session with top L&D leaders, Michael shared research and field observations from Hudson’s work in 2025—and what they might mean for 2026. In turn, participants shared their own experiences and insights. The conversation reinforced one thing we all know: organizations need to expand their leaders’ capacity for change.

Read key learnings from the session.

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Burned out with burnout, and digging deeper

This year, we sat across the table from hollow-eyed executives who weren’t looking for catchy phrases. Rather, they wanted challenging ideas for challenging times: negative capability, sensemaking, change fitness. “Leaders in 2025 seemed to understand, perhaps viscerally, that flattening complexity into comforting stories was costing them more than it was saving,” Michael writes in The Paradox of 2026. Change is the medium we’re in. The leaders who learn to swim in the rapids—and pass that capacity to their teams—are the ones who will thrive.

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Stepping with confidence into the unknown

Sensemaking turns uncertainty into meaning, but not automatically into action. The bigger the realization, the more likely paralysis follows. That’s why possibility thinking matters: “the practiced ability to perceive openings, exercise agency despite incomplete information, and take steps that reveal the next set of options,” as Michael writes in From Making Sense to Taking Steps. Working toward an “adjacent possible” requires tapping collective intelligence, because, as Michael writes in To Expand What’s Possible, Lead Through Collective Intelligence, “the richest possibilities show up when groups think together.” It’s a discipline, not an attitude.

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In an emotional recession, empathy is just the start

“I know how difficult this is for you,” a CEO says during a mass layoff announcement. And then the call ends. The real emotional processing happens elsewhere, without leadership present. “When leaders don’t support their people in metabolizing these difficult feelings,” Michael writes in Change-Fit Leaders Don’t Just Offer Empathy, They Build Containers, “those feelings become silent obstacles.” What’s needed is a container: a relational space where people can examine those feelings without flooding the system. This preserves cognitive range and helps teams more effectively interpret and integrate change.

Content Round-up: The Bonus Round

Many leaders in our community are entering what Hudson founder Pam McLean calls “the wild middle of late adulthood,” a stage that should be less about retiring than about reinvention.

The new identity won’t design itself—but it doesn’t have to be designed alone

In an MEA fireside chat, Crafting a Meaningful Post-Work Chapter, Pam explores what happens when the identity that organized your days for decades falls away. The antidote isn’t busyness, it’s curiosity, small experiments, disrupted routines, and doing that work alongside others. “It doesn’t happen as well alone as it does in the company of others,” she says. She develops this further with Chip Conley on the Midlife Chrysalis podcast: “The kinds of questions we ask ourselves really shape the lives we live.”

In The Wild Middle of Late Adulthood, Pam explores a question that can open the aperture narrowed in traditional approaches to retirement: What are these extra decades for? In The Hidden Curriculum of Later Life, she draws on Lars Tornstam’s theory of gerotranscendence—a natural shift away from achievement-centered identity toward something more reflective—and finds in it something reassuring: there is something to grow into here, not merely something to leave behind. That spirit carries into Awe Muscles for the Wild Later Years, where Pam makes the case that awe—the capacity to be genuinely surprised by an ordinary moment—is a practice, not a feeling. Researcher Dacher Keltner finds it increases with age. But only if we stay available to it.

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