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How Kerryn Kathleen Kohl Is Rewriting the Rules of Leadership in the Age of AI**

By Karl Woolfenden — BCN.News

Time is moving faster than ever—or at least it feels that way. Information floods our feeds, workplaces are shifting beneath our feet, and technology evolves before our eyes. For leaders navigating this new reality, the question isn’t if they’ll need to change, but how quickly they can adapt.

That’s why Kerryn Kathleen Kohl’s new book, Oh SHI(F)T! Now What? Navigating the Age of AI, has struck such a nerve with executives across the globe. A leadership strategist based in Australia, Kerryn helps leaders and organizations face the chaos of the digital era while staying grounded in what makes us human.

During our recent conversation on BCN.News LinkedAM, Kerryn took us inside the ideas behind her book—ideas that are reshaping how companies think about talent, culture, collaboration, and the future of work.

What emerged was a powerful message: as AI accelerates, leadership must become more adaptive, more human, and more intentional than ever.

The Myth of Adaptive Leadership

One of the first things Kerryn tackles in her book is the misconception around adaptive leadership. Too many leaders, she says, are sprinting on a technology treadmill—adding tools, rolling out dashboards, and racing to keep up with competitors—while leaving people behind.

“We’re not making good use of the tools available to us,” she explains. “We’re trying to keep pace, but we’re losing the human stuff… We’re trying to lead with technology and leaving the people behind again.”

Her argument is clear:

Technology should support purpose—not the other way around.

The adaptive leader of 2025 isn’t the one who deploys the most software.
It’s the one who slows down, asks the right questions, and reconnects people to purpose.

Digital Transformation Isn’t a Tech Project—It’s a People Strategy

Digital transformation has become a buzzword, but Kerryn reminds us that it’s far more than a procurement exercise.

Most organizations, she says, start by chasing technology:

• What tools should we buy?
• What platform should we migrate to?
• What are competitors implementing?
  
  

But the real question should be: What are we trying to achieve?
Only then should technology enter the conversation.

“Be people-led and purpose-led,” she says. “Then choose the technology to support that.”

The danger of tech-first thinking?
Technical debt, overwhelmed employees, scattered communication—and a culture that breaks faster than it can be repaired.

A Digital Culture on the Brink

When I asked Kerryn about early warning signs that workplace culture is cracking under digital strain, she didn’t hesitate:

“I think we’ve missed them already.”

Quiet quitting, disengagement, and burnout aren’t isolated trends—they’re symptoms of an overwhelmed workforce. Employees are drowning in notifications, jumping between 10 different platforms, and struggling to make sense of the noise.

Kerryn argues that leaders must now step back and intentionally rebuild:

• Rebuild trust
• Re-establish clarity
• Reduce noise
• Re-engage people at a human level
  
  

And we need to do it thoughtfully—not by rolling out even more tech.

When a cyberattack strikes, chaos often follows. Systems shut down, communications collapse, and leadership scrambles to understand what’s happening. Yet, amid the turmoil, one fact is clear: prevention alone is no longer enough.

That’s the insight that led Arvind Parthasarathi, veteran entrepreneur and founder of CYGNVS, to create a platform designed not just to prevent cyber incidents, but to help organizations respond to them with clarity, speed, and resilience.

From Academia to Startup Vision

After selling his previous startup, Parthasarathi turned his attention to giving back. Working pro bono, he joined Project Crossroads, a research initiative spanning nine global universities, including MIT, Stanford, Oxford, and Tokyo. Their mission: to establish a “standard of care” for boards and executives around cybersecurity oversight.

What he discovered was striking. “Organizations were pouring money into prevention,” he recalled, “but when incidents actually happened, the response was total chaos.”

That realization became the seed for CYGNVS (pronounced Sig-nus). Founded in January 2020 in a borrowed conference room, the company’s name draws from Cygnus, Latin for “swan.” Cyber incidents, often likened to Black Swan events, demand a new kind of preparedness—and CYGNVS was built to provide it.

The Out-of-Band Advantage

At the heart of CYGNVS is the idea of an “out-of-band” platform—a secure, independent command center organizations can rely on when traditional systems are compromised.

Attackers increasingly target corporate communications first—email, conferencing tools, even identity systems—precisely because that’s where crisis coordination happens. If the attackers are already listening in, a company’s defenses can crumble before they’re even activated.

Parthasarathi compares CYGNVS to a hurricane bunker: a place where legal teams, executives, and responders can gather safely, run playbooks, and protect privilege and confidentiality. Crucially, the system is company-owned—not tied to individual accounts vulnerable to insider threats or employee turnover.

Rethinking Crisis Response

Traditional incident response plans often sit buried in dusty binders or forgotten folders. In practice, they’re rarely updated, much less followed in a real emergency. CYGNVS transforms those outdated manuals into interactive, mobile-first workflows.

Rather than confronting leaders with an 80-page document during a breach, the platform drip-feeds tasks step by step—adaptive, guided, and designed for how people actually behave under stress. “Human beings in crisis don’t think the same way,” Parthasarathi explained. “So we shift the paradigm: two steps now, two steps later, until the organization executes as one.”

The result is muscle memory. Just as submariners drill daily for emergencies, CYGNVS clients run tabletop exercises frequently—not annually, but monthly, even weekly—building resilience into their organizational DNA.

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