Leo Johnson

Leo Johnson is a lecturer at Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, co-founder of the advisory firm Sustainable Finance (now part of PwC), and former Head of Disruption at PwC itself. He specialises in helping leaders grapple with the megatrends shaping our volatile century. From climate risk and AI convergence to the behavioural and institutional logics that keep systems locked in the status quo. Johnson’s work cuts through the greenwash and hype to confront a deeper question: what is stopping us?

A former World Bank economist and winner of the IFC Corporate Award for his role in establishing the Equator Principles, Leo Johnson combines a practitioner’s grasp of finance with a cultural historian’s eye for systems in stasis and flux. He is co-author of Turnaround Challenge and the lead author behind PwC’s State of Climate Tech, Low Carbon Economy Index, and Net Zero Future 50. He also unpacks these issues for a wider audience as presenter of BBC Radio 4’s FutureProofing, Hacking Capitalism, and Hacking Happiness.

Leo Johnson’s work explores the cognitive contortions individuals and organisations perform to justify inaction from techno-solutionism to catastrophism. He names these forces plainly: institutional rigidity, motivated cognition, the false securities of incrementalism. But he is no fatalist. For Johnson, the future is not something to be awaited, but actively shaped.

He has spoken on TEDx stages, written in columns for the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, and advised C-suite executives. In commentary, Johnson challenges leaders to move beyond optics and embrace the messy, necessary work of transformational change. That means rewiring institutions and rethinking narratives of risk, progress, and human agency.

Whether addressing methane beneath the Siberian ice, the velocity of AI, or the psychology of corporate denial, Leo Johnson brings disarming clarity to his central question: how do we unstick ourselves from futures we no longer want?