IN THIS episode of the Lloyd’s List podcast, Synergy chief executive Jesper Kristensen considers two significant and timely questions: where is maritime leadership heading and who will define it?

He tackles them from both an individual and an industry standpoint before discussing whether attitudes outside shipping are now influencing the sector’s direction.

In the current climate of global regulatory and trade changes, the shipping industry is extremely volatile, requiring its leaders to be rapid adapters; “we need to be capable of accepting that tomorrow is most probably not going to be like yesterday”, he says in this podcast.

Within this environment, shipmanagers are in a particularly competitive and challenging arena and he outlines how companies and the leaders they recruit should respond to that situation. In particular, they must not be “satisfied by things staying the same” he believes.

For the industry as a whole, he imagines it as being on a journey with no specific destination, describing it as a continuous movement with several waypoints along the way and with shipmanagers in the driving seat.

He singles out shipping’s transition towards lower emission energy options as one of those waypoints and suggests that, from a shipmanagement perspective, it is important now to move away from focusing on management fees to considering total operating costs, which can be reduced by exploring efficiencies.

In the podcast he is reminded that, during MEPC83 in April 2025, he had posted a message on social media declaring that “there is broad consensus that the transition to zero-emission fuels must accelerate”.

Since then, however, US President Trump has opposed the International Maritime Organization’s climate initiative and has made threats against IMO member states that choose to support it. Reflecting on these developments, Kristensen considers not only whether this previous consensus still holds but also whether this intervention means that the industry’s direction is being externally defined.

Artificial intelligence may also be viewed as an external influence and Kristensen describes how Synergy itself makes use of the technology to analyse data from across its fleet to support its superintendents and improve services.

He goes on to speak about its broader application and suggests that international standards should be developed to provide some uniformity to its application.

Looking ahead to future leadership developments, he predicts that many future managers will have a business-related education — as did he — and will bring skills that are not shipping-specific to the sector. If so, they could be a challenge to an industry often noted for its conservative approach to decision-making.

But it is a prospect he welcomes, telling the podcast that such thinking would be for the better. “Looking at that the way we operate more critically is something that outsiders can bring to this industry,” he said.