New Podcast Series : Leading with Foresight     Jo Farmer on Future-Ready Leadership

Jo Farmer, joint managing partner of law firm Lewis Silken talks to The Future Laboratory’s co-founder, Martin Raymond about leadership thinking in his on-going exploration of what makes someone a great strategic foresight thinker and leader.

Law firms are built to reward the heroic fixer. But Jo Farmer, joint managing partner at the luxury and creative industries law firm Lewis Silkin, is rewriting the script. Her shift from billable-hour problem-solver to long-range custodian is deliberate. ‘I think of it as being like a custodian of the future,’ she says – a role that demands time, perspective and the courage to delay tidy answers.

Farmer’s antidote to short-termism is structural, not performative. She ring-fences thinking time. ‘There’s no beginning, middle and end when you’re in leadership,’ she notes, so she blocks out ‘Friday no-meeting sessions’ for deep reflection.

Some are solitary, she tells Raymond; others are spent hiking with her co-leader, Richard Miskella. Those walks have no agenda – by design. ‘Long, long walks… just talking, no agenda,’ she says.

Shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes on a shared horizon, the pair surface the knottier issues that standard meetings rush past. Ideas then get translated into mind-maps – simple visuals in Canva or PowerPoint that turn ambiguity into a plan you can point at.

A turning point came via Harvard’s Adaptive Leadership course, which she took with fellow leaders and CEOs from around the world. And her insight and key takeaway? Management solves known problems; leadership tackles the undefined. ‘When it’s not obvious what the solution is,’ Farmer argues, ‘you resist the reflex to fix.’ You sometimes need to let problems ‘ferment’ or, in some cases ‘turn the radiator up’, as she puts it, ‘so that collectively we sit with just enough discomfort to force us to co-create a better path. That demands patience – a stretch for anyone raised on delivery and perfection.’