STAYING STILL & RELYING ON WHAT YOU KNOW ARE THE BIGGEST RISKS

Olivier Vojetta
Jun 23
5 min read

What Australia's Top CEOs Are Actually Losing Sleep Over

Hard to be in the CEO seat these days!

The room at HAVAS Village on the evening of 3 June 2026 had the charge of a conversation that mattered. Eighty-five of Australia's most senior leaders had gathered not to hear what they already knew, but to be confronted by what they didn't - and by what, in the quiet of their own organisations, was keeping them awake at night.

The Danger of the Comfort Zone

If there was a single word that surfaced, unprompted, across multiple exchanges during the Argonauts CEO Survey 2026 Launch Event, it was inertia. Not the dramatic, visible inertia of an organisation in crisis - but the subtler, more insidious kind: the inertia of success, of pattern recognition, of knowing your sector so well that you stop truly questioning it.

Steve Vamos, former CEO of Xero and a global executive of Apple, Microsoft and IBM across three decades, did not mince words on this point. Having led through multiple waves of technological disruption, his perspective carries weight: the organisations he has seen struggle most acutely in moments of disruption are rarely those that lacked resources or intelligence. They are the ones that confused experience with wisdom, and past performance with future readiness.

"The key risk nowadays is relying on what you know and staying in your lane during disruption… thinking you are safe that way." — Steve Vamos, former CEO, Xero

The CEO Survey 2026 data reinforced this with striking clarity: Australian executives rank the speed of change outpacing organisational adaptation as one of their primary sources of strategic anxiety - not fear of the unknown, but fear of not moving fast enough away from the known.

AI as Amplifier - of Both Opportunity and Exposure

The panel was unambiguous on one point: Artificial Intelligence is not the risk. The risk is the decision not to engage with it seriously - or conversely, to engage with it without the judgment infrastructure to do so responsibly.

What emerged from the discussion was a nuanced picture of AI as an amplifier: it makes fast organisations faster, and exposed organisations more exposed. In a landscape where the half-life of competitive advantage is shrinking, leaders who treat AI adoption as a future problem are, by the survey's logic, already behind.

"Our future is probably more human than it’s ever been, because now we need better people with better ideas." — Gayle While, CEO Survey 2026 Launch Event, 3 June 2026

Gayle While, CEO of HAVAS Host, spoke to this from the vantage point of a group that sits at the intersection of human creativity and technological transformation. Her framing was characteristically direct, and has stayed with many in the room since.

That paradox - more human, not less, precisely because of AI - ran like a thread through the entire evening. The conclusion: the leaders losing sleep over AI are not the ones worrying about whether to adopt it. They are the ones wrestling with the far harder question of what kind of people and culture are needed to wield it well.

Geopolitical Turbulence and the Limits of Scenario Planning

Beyond AI, the CEO Survey 2026 flagged a second major source of executive anxiety that proved equally fertile ground for discussion: geopolitical disruption, and specifically, the collapse of the assumptions on which many organisations built their risk models in the preceding decade.

Supply chains, trade relationships, talent flows, regulatory frameworks - all are being renegotiated in real time, in ways that make traditional scenario planning feel inadequate. The question the survey posed, and the one that animated some of the night’s most candid exchanges, was this: what does resilience actually look like when the scenario you planned for is not the one that arrives?

"Everybody's has a plan until they get punched in the face" — Mike Tyson, Former Boxer (not present at the CEO Survey Launch!)

The answer that emerged was that the most resilient organisations are not those with the best plans, but those with the best capacity to adapt when the plan breaks. That capacity, the panel agreed, is built through culture, through the quality of the leadership team, and through an institutional willingness to be wrong without catastrophising.

What the CEO Survey Found: The Asymmetry of Consequence

One of the most pointed findings of the CEO Survey 2026 concerns what the survey calls the asymmetry of consequence in the AI era: the cost of moving too slowly is now greater than the cost of moving imperfectly. Speed of movement is critical to success. This is a structural reversal for many Australian organisations, where the cultural default has historically been to wait for proof of concept before committing.

The survey’s respondents were clear: that default is now itself a risk position. In a market where the first-mover advantage in AI-enabled decision-making can be decisive - in talent, in client relationships, in operational efficiency - caution has a cost that is no longer invisible.

This was not received as a call to recklessness. The nuance the panel introduced - and that the survey data supports - is that the opposite of staying still is not moving randomly. It is moving with intention and readiness: building the internal capacity to absorb and deploy change, rather than simply chasing it.

The Open Bespoke Boardroom: Where the Real Conversation Happened

If the panel provided the framework, it was the Open Boardroom - the signature format of The Argonauts Series, in which the audience becomes the panel - that gave the evening its texture.

What the First Senators and broader Argonauts community surfaced in that session was something that surveys rarely capture: the emotional dimension of strategic risk. The fatigue of leading through sustained uncertainty. The difficulty of maintaining conviction when the data is ambiguous and the timeline is unclear. The loneliness, acknowledged more openly than expected, of being the person in the room who is supposed to have the answers.

It was in those exchanges - unscripted, unrehearsed, and utterly unguarded - that the evening delivered what The Argonauts Series is built for: not information, but insight. Not networking, but recognition - the recognition that the challenges you face as a leader are shared, that the people around the table understand them, and that the conversation itself is a form of leadership development.

What Australia’s Top CEOs Are Actually Losing Sleep Over

The answer, it turns out, is not any single disruption or threat. It is the gap - the gap between the pace of change outside the organisation and the pace of adaptation inside it. The gap between the quality of the conversation in the boardroom and the quality of the conversation that is actually needed. The gap between knowing what the future requires and being genuinely ready to meet it.

Staying still is not a neutral position. In 2026, it is a choice - and one that Australia’s most thoughtful CEOs are refusing to make.

Article Three — The Character Premium: Why Who You Are as a Leader Matters More Than What You Know — coming shortly.