By: Sarah Arnot - Partner at Heidrick & Struggles

South African boards and HR teams share a problem that is widely recognised and rarely resolved: the leaders who perform best in interviews are not always the leaders who perform best in the role. Competency-based interviewing, which is still the dominant standard, draws from behavioural psychology but remains anchored in the past, asking candidates to recall and articulate how they handled previous situations. It measures a leader's ability to prescribe their leadership approach as opposed to demonstrating their capacity to lead in a new or unfamiliar environment.

According to Sarah Arnot, Partner at Heidrick & Struggles – a global leadership advisory firm – adding structured situational assessment to the traditional, ‘gold-standard’ assessment process, predictability of future performance rises significantly.

“This grounds leadership assessment in how leaders actually think and act under pressure rather than how they report having done so. We developed the isAgile Immersive Assessment tool for exactly this reason, to address the historic gap in organisations’ ability to scale deep situational insights across the broader engine room of future leadership talent. This technology is a major shift in leadership assessment and allows us to scale a methodology that was previously restricted to the highest levels of an organisation due to the high costs and full consultant teams needed to create a fully immersive experience.”

The tool places executives and senior managers in AI-driven immersive simulations, including real-time crisis scenarios inspired by the kinds of high-pressure decision environments that define military and elite sports performance. The AI captures and analyses those natural responses, producing data-driven insights into a leader’s strengths, risks, problem-solving capabilities, and learning agility. 

Because the tool emphasises what leaders actually do, it helps mitigate some of the limitations inherent in self-reported assessments and provides a richer understanding of how a leader may perform when the environment changes.

Viewing agility as a spectrum

The conceptual foundation of isAgile rests on a principle many organisations articulate but few operationalise: Leadership agility is a spectrum of skills that can be learned and developed, rather than traits a leader either has or does not have. “Understanding where one sits on this spectrum is the first step toward becoming a more authentic and thoughtful leader,” says Arnot.

The tool uses Heidrick & Struggles’ proprietary META framework – Mobilise, Execute, and Transform with Agility – to evaluate four competencies: 

1. Foresight – the ability to anticipate and navigate ambiguity.

2. Learning – a growth mindset characterised by curiosity, humility, and openness to feedback.

3. Adaptability – the capacity to flex leadership style across different situations and people.

4. Resilience – the propensity to recover from setbacks through ownership and commitment. 

These are often labelled as ‘soft skills’, but Arnot argues they are core leadership capabilities that are difficult to master and not always easy to measure through traditional assessments.

Assessments can reveal behavioural patterns that emerge under pressure, such as heightened reactivity, rigidity, or scepticism. These may affect a leader’s ability to exercise sound judgement and remain flexible in rapidly changing situations. Once identified through observable data, these tendencies can become the basis for more targeted leadership development.

Reaching into the organisation’s engine room

The most consequential implication of isAgile is its scalability. High-level situational assessments have historically been reserved for CEO and executive committee appointments because they are too expensive and resource-intensive to apply more broadly. By scaling situational assessment through AI, Heidrick & Struggles can now bring this depth of insight to the senior management population where future executive talent is typically being developed long before it becomes visible to the board.

“AI-driven tools are rapidly redefining how boards and HR teams look at their leadership bench, and how they make succession decisions. With isAgile, HR teams can now identify high-potential leaders years earlier and adjust to upskill them according to what objective behavioural data interpreted by experienced human assessors suggests rather than performance reviews and management perception. The result is a succession pipeline grounded in evidence, and a clearer, more defensible basis for the appointments that will ultimately shape the organisation's future,” Arnot concludes.