The recent change of the All Blacks coach has generated more than sporting debate. It has opened up a wider conversation about leadership, choice, and accountability in environments where complexity is rising faster than certainty.

Decisions that once appeared straightforward now sit inside layers of data, analytics, governance, public scrutiny, and expectation. Add access to AI, real-time performance metrics, and the pressure of national identity, and the space for clear, grounded choice can feel increasingly narrow.

A reader of The Leader’s Choice, reflecting on my recent video The Choice Point, captured something important about this moment. Their observation wasn’t really about rugby. It was about how leadership itself is changing.

They noted how data has become central to decision-making, reshaping the landscape coaches and leaders operate within. When this is combined with each player’s sense of value, worth, agency, and personal sovereignty, making good choices can start to feel almost impossible. Recent decisions by the NZ Rugby Board highlighted this tension. Head coaches who once had time and latitude to build effective teams now appear constrained by forces beyond their control.

The question that followed was a telling one – where does choice actually sit now? With the coach? The players? The administrators? Or the systems and algorithms generating the data?

It’s a question many leaders are quietly asking in their own contexts.

What feels different today is not just the complexity of the problems, but the conditions in which leaders are expected to solve them. Data offers insight, yet it also multiplies perspectives. AI accelerates analysis, while often outpacing our ability to make sense of it. 

Leaders today are swimming in information while often starving for meaning. More data expands what is visible. It doesn’t automatically expand wisdom. Without the capacity to interpret, prioritise, and contextualise what we’re seeing, choice can feel constricting rather than enabling. In that environment, choice can feel paralysing rather than expansive.

The human dimension is where this complexity truly lives. Data can inform performance decisions. It cannot hold identity, fear, ambition, trust, or belonging. It cannot resolve how people experience their worth inside a system, or how safe they feel when the stakes are high and the scrutiny relentless.

Leaders are still required to navigate all of this. Often with less time. Often under more pressure. Often while being asked to justify decisions through technical evidence rather than human judgement.

This is why I’m less interested in locating choice in a single role or authority. My sense is that choice now lives in the spaces in between – between people and systems, data and judgement, performance and identity.

Choice is shaped by worldviews, assumptions, and the relational field leaders create around them. As complexity increases, so does the demand on a leader’s inner bandwidth – their capacity to hold multiple truths, tolerate uncertainty, and remain grounded while operating inside highly technical environments.

In these in-between spaces, narrative matters. Ongoing communication matters. The way leaders make sense of what is happening, and help others do the same, becomes a stabilising force. This has always been part of leadership. It simply carries more weight now. Leaders must become experts in managing mindset - their own and others.

Seen through this lens, leadership development takes on a different purpose. It’s not about finding the right answer or mastering a more complex algorithm. It’s about expanding how leaders think, relate, and act. Developing the ability to remain open and curious under pressure. Strengthening the capacity to stay human while navigating systems that increasingly reward speed, certainty, and optimisation.

The challenge of our time isn’t only that leadership decisions have become more complex. It’s that the inner demands placed on leaders have grown just as quickly.

Moments like this in rugby invite an easy search for blame or certainty. They also offer a quieter invitation – to reflect on what kind of leadership is required when choice no longer sits neatly in one place, and when performance depends as much on sense-making as it does on data.

That feels like a conversation worth staying with.