What you want to know about Leap Trends.

Leap Trends is a trend monitor. It collects what authorities (universities, research institutes, consultancies, regulators and subject experts) publish about organisational development, and sorts those publications by organisational condition and by theme. For each condition, you can see which themes attract the most publications.

The pages of the most discussed themes set out what the publications show when taken together, and which topics are in play within each theme. For some of the topics there is a briefing: the core of the matter, the key figures with their sources, the number of publications per month and what the topic means for the leadership team.

There are no case studies of our own, no invented examples and no services. It is an overview of what others publish, meant as a starting point. What a development means for an organisation depends on where that organisation stands.

Structure, culture, leadership and technology are the four organisational conditions in Leap’s model. Change in an organisation rarely happens in just one place. A development such as AI is often treated as a matter for IT and a new policy, yet in practice it also affects how the work is organised, which agreements apply and who decides what. That is why Leap Trends follows the publications across all four.

Put the publications side by side and you see that the research itself often draws links between the conditions. If a briefing touches on more than one condition, those conditions are listed with it.

Structure

How the work is organised: roles, mandates, meetings and processes. Who decides what, and how work is divided and coordinated. Including management layers, span of control, decision-making, processes, meeting structures, work design and the flexible workforce.

Culture

The shared norms, values and unwritten rules that shape how people behave and treat each other. Including organisational culture, psychological safety, trust, collaboration, wellbeing and workload, job satisfaction and vitality, and hybrid working.

Leadership

Setting the direction and the goals, and making sure the organisation understands and acts on them. Including the role of the middle manager, succession at the top, planning and public sector leadership.

Technology

The systems and tools people work with, and how far people are willing and able to use them. Including AI at work, agents, AI governance, digital skills and the digital mindset.

The model behind Leap Trends

An organisational condition is one of the four fixed headings Leap Trends uses to sort everything: structure, culture, leadership and technology. Each condition contains themes, such as job satisfaction and vitality, or work design. Each theme contains topics, such as sickness absence, burnout or enjoyment of work.

The home page shows, for each condition, the themes that attract the most publications. A theme’s page sets out what the publications show when taken together, which topics are in play within it and, where one exists, the briefing on a topic.

We use the word trend only for what it is: something a lot is being published about. A briefing is not a trend. It is an overview, compiled with AI, of what several organisations publish about a topic within a theme.

The domains in the model (shared vision, systems thinking, team learning and collaboration, and craftsmanship) are not themes in Leap Trends. For now, Leap Trends shows the challenges organisations face and where the attention of research and the market is going.

Following trends by domain would mean also tracking approaches and methods, such as new ways of developing craftsmanship or of learning as a team. That is a next step.

The model behind Leap Trends

A briefing belongs to the condition in which an organisation has to change in order to respond. The trigger does not decide the condition: AI is often the trigger, while the change usually sits in another condition.

Structure

The change is in how things are organised: roles, layers, mandates, decision-making, processes, meetings, capacity or the flexible workforce.

Culture

The change is in behaviour, norms or experience: trust, safety, collaboration, wellbeing, workload, job satisfaction.

Leadership

The change is in the direction, or in what managers themselves do: their role, their example, succession.

Technology

The tool itself is the focus: introduction, use, skills and rules for its use.

If the core of a briefing names two conditions equally strongly, the most important key figure decides: if it measures something about roles, it is Structure; about experience, Culture; about managers, Leadership; about use of the tool, Technology.

A briefing can touch on at most two other conditions. They are listed with the briefing under “Also touches on”. In the chart of publications per month, each publication counts towards one condition, so the totals add up.

Each individual publication is given one condition and one to three themes from a fixed list, using AI. How that works is explained under the question on the most discussed themes.

Methodology: condition and themes

An organisation that wants to stay relevant has to keep reinventing itself. That only works if you see in time what is changing outside and act on it before it happens to you. Leap Trends exists so that you don’t have to read everything yourself.

Every briefing can be downloaded as a PDF, with the Download as PDF button: the key point, the figures with their sources and what it means for the leadership team, for a meeting or your own document. Figures without the Checked label were taken from the source by AI; compare them with the source before you use them.

Once a month, the monthly newsletter sums up what changed in Leap Trends: which briefings are new or updated, which figures were added (if any), and which themes were most discussed in each condition.

About the monthly newsletter

It lists, for each group, the challenges that boards, executive teams, middle managers, and HR and L&D run into, according to recent research. Each challenge comes with its key figures and their sources, the sources themselves and the related briefings.

A challenge is included when research from 2025 or later measures it, with at least two sources from different organisations. The headings are neutral descriptions, not quotes. Many of the figures come from international surveys; each source states its region, and its sample where the source gives one. Where a source could not be read directly, we say which news report the figure was taken from. If a challenge has no briefing, there is no briefing on it yet.

See Who it’s for

Publications are not added on a fixed schedule. The home page shows the date of the newest publication and the day of the latest count. Each briefing shows when it was last updated. If that was more than three months ago, the briefing says so; in that case, compare the figures with the source before you use them.

All changes, with dates

Among others, the public publications of McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, Gartner (press releases only), Korn Ferry, Gallup, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Josh Bersin Company, Capgemini Research Institute, PwC, Mercer, Edelman, World Economic Forum, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and TNO, London Business School, Berenschot and academic journals via OpenAlex, and essays by subject experts such as Ethan Mollick, Amy Edmondson, Herminia Ibarra and Lynda Gratton.

It also draws on academic articles from universities in Europe and North America, retrieved through OpenAlex, an open database of academic publications. A briefing only includes articles that were no more than a year old at the time of the search and that deal with the same phenomenon, up to ten per briefing. How we choose them is explained in the question below.

The source register shows, for each organisation, how many publications count, what kind of publications they are and which briefings they appear in.

Go to the source register

How an organisation works is bound up with the culture it operates in: how people view hierarchy, how decisions are reached and what is expected of a manager. Research from countries with a working culture similar to that of the Netherlands is therefore easier to apply to the organisations Leap Trends is meant for.

That is why we mainly bring together publications from universities, institutes and firms in Europe and North America. We do include global surveys, and where a survey also gives figures for the Netherlands or Europe, we prefer to cite those. This says nothing about the quality of research elsewhere, only about how well it compares with Dutch practice.

For each briefing, we search OpenAlex, an open database of academic publications, for two to four phrases from the core of the briefing, in the title and abstract of each article. Fixed rules apply.

We only include journal articles that were no more than twelve months old at the time of the search, with at least one author at a university in Europe or North America. The journal must be a core journal: an international academic journal that OpenAlex classifies as core, using the criteria of CWTS in Leiden. The article must have an abstract and must not have been retracted.

An article is added to a briefing if it deals with the same phenomenon in organisations. Articles that point the other way are included too, so that the picture does not become one-sided. Each search adds no more than five articles to a briefing, and no more than ten in total. If nothing fits, the list stays empty.

Each article shows the first university from Europe or North America in its list of authors. An article counts as a publication of the research type, in the month it appeared. The text and key figures of a briefing are not based on these articles but on the sources listed above them.

The searching and the first assessment are done with AI, following these rules; borderline cases go to a partner at Leap.

Methodology: what counts as a publication

A topic gets its own briefing when at least two independent organisations publish on it and at least one of those publications is based on research or a survey. A single striking report is not enough for a briefing.

Only as a tip. Other people’s posts are not collected automatically, because LinkedIn’s terms forbid it. If Leap comes across a relevant publication on LinkedIn, the link goes into processing with a note of our own. The post itself is not copied.

A source is given a sector when the publication is about organisations in that sector, such as a survey of banks or a report on regional healthcare. Most sources survey across sectors and are not given one.

A briefing counts for a sector as soon as one of its sources is about that sector. The filter therefore shows where the sector itself appears in the publications. Briefings that cover all sectors apply there too, and you can include them in the filter.

Every publication by an authority that Leap Trends has collected counts: a study, a survey, a policy document or law, a press release accompanying a report, or an opinion piece by an expert. Publications that do not (yet) belong to any briefing are also in the list of all publications. Publications are counted per month, by date of publication. The chart on the home page counts all of them; the chart on a briefing’s page counts only the publications for that briefing.

Each publication is labelled with its type:

Research

Peer-reviewed or methodologically sound research, meta-analyses, longitudinal series.

Survey

A one-off or annual survey with a known sample, usually by a firm or an institute.

Policy

A policy document, law, agreement or guideline from a government, regulator or umbrella body; facts about what has been agreed.

Press release

A press release accompanying a study or report; we report what it says, in our own words.

Opinion

An article or essay by an expert or professor, without a measurement of its own.

In the counts, every publication carries the same weight, whatever its type.

Methodology: publications

Each publication is given one organisational condition and one to three themes from a fixed list per condition: the themes Leap Trends follows. These are assigned by AI, based on the title and, for academic articles, the abstract. A theme only counts if the publication is genuinely about it, not if it is mentioned in passing. If no theme fits, the publication gets none and counts only towards the total for its condition.

For each condition, every theme shows how many of the past year’s publications it appears in, for example “in 12 of 140”. A publication can belong to several themes, so the numbers do not add up to the total. An upward arrow means that the theme’s share in the last three months is at least one and a half times its share in the three months before, with at least three publications.

The count shows what a lot is being published about, not what is true. What the publications on a theme show is set out on the theme’s page. Those conclusions are compiled with AI from the publications themselves, and each conclusion lists the publications it rests on.

The chart on the home page counts all the publications Leap Trends collected each month, split across the four organisational conditions. The line view shows a three-month average for each condition, so that a single spike does not distort the picture.

It is a measure of attention. In the chart, ten opinion pieces carry the same weight as ten studies.

Publications are not added on a fixed schedule, and some are found by hand. As a result, recent months are often less completely counted than earlier ones, and a fall in the last few months can look bigger than it really is. The current month is left out of the comparisons per condition on the home page, because it is not yet complete.

They are compiled with AI from public sources, with the source for every figure. We use Claude, a language model made by Anthropic, which reads and sorts the publications and drafts the text of the briefings.

The condition and themes of each publication, and the conclusions on the pages of the most discussed themes, are also compiled with AI. Each conclusion lists the publications it rests on.

Methodology: conclusions and briefings

Key figures labelled Checked have been compared with the source by a person, so for every key figure you can see whether that has happened. If it says Not yet checked, the figure was taken from the source by AI; check it against the source before you use it. The running text of the briefings and the conclusions on the theme pages has not been reviewed by an editor.

Read the briefings and conclusions, then, as an organised overview of what others publish, with the source always at hand.

It means that a person has compared the key figure with the source and confirmed that both the figure and its description are correct. The date next to it shows when that was done.

If it says Not yet checked, the figure was extracted from the source by AI alone. If you want to use such a figure, take it from the source itself.

Email info@leapcompany.nl with the link to the page and what is wrong. A correction to a briefing is recorded, with its date, in that briefing’s history and in the changelog.

Email info@leapcompany.nlAll changes

Sources are summarised in our own words. From each source, no more than one sentence is quoted verbatim, in quotation marks, with the name, title, date and link. Individual figures are reproduced with their source; facts are free to use, but the sentence around them belongs to Leap Trends.

No images, charts, tables or full texts are reproduced, and no paywall is bypassed. From Gartner, only what appears in press releases is included.

Names of models and brands belong to their owners. Mentioning a name does not mean there is any collaboration, or that the owner endorses this site.

Only through official feeds and APIs, under a recognisable name and with an email address. A publisher that does not want to be read by machines is not read.

Academic articles come from the open OpenAlex API. From these we use the title, authors, institution, date and abstract, never the full text.

As: Leap Trends, title of the briefing, date last updated, URL. On every briefing’s page, the Cite button in the bar copies that line for you. The figures belong to the sources named; for a figure, cite the original source.

Yes. All published briefings and sources are in a single JSON file, and all publications with their condition and themes are in a CSV file. You can follow new and updated briefings through the RSS feed.

Briefings and sources (JSON)Publications (CSV)RSS feed

Email info@leapcompany.nl with the link to the page. If you are right, it will be changed, even if it is only a wrong date.

These arrangements on sources, AI and objections have applied since 26 October 2026. If anything changes, the new date will appear here.

Email info@leapcompany.nl