What does it actually take to lead and innovate when technology is moving faster than certainty? That was the question at the heart of our first ever Loom conversation – a new quarterly thought-leadership series from Cantarus designed to create space for the kind of leadership dialogue that usually gets drowned out by the noise.
For our inaugural episode, Cantarus CEO and co-founder Lee Adams sat down with Mats Persson, CEO of Umbraco, for a conversation that ranged from personal career decisions to geopolitical uncertainty, from AI hype cycles to the quiet discipline of knowing when to walk away from a bet. What emerged was a candid and grounded conversation for leaders navigating complexity in 2026.
If you joined us for the first Loom – or are catching up – here are the key themes and takeaways from the conversation.
Mats opened the conversation with a characteristically honest account of how he came to join Umbraco. It wasn't a leap into the unknown – it was a deliberate narrowing of the decision space.
"You have to start looking at what your preferences are," he said. "The sweet spot for me is getting in on an organisation that has around 100 people. I've learned that over the years. If it's too small, I get too stressed about all the opportunities and no capabilities. So from that perspective, Umbraco was in the sweet spot."
This idea of the sweet spot – knowing where you thrive, and using that to filter the options in front of you – was one Lee echoed from his own experience at Cantarus: "Instead of looking at every possible job on the market, you had an idea of where you wanted to be and what your fit was. We think about the same thing as an organisation: where are we going to succeed as a business? And I guess it's no different from where am I going to succeed as an individual?"
The lesson for leaders: before you can make confident decisions, you need to understand where you operate at your best. That clarity doesn't eliminate risk, but it dramatically sharpens the quality of the bets you make.
One of the most consistent threads throughout the conversation was the commercial and relational value of radical honesty.
For Mats, this philosophy extends to how Umbraco operates as a business: "People can handle the truth. If you're transparent with your customers, problems become an opportunity to fix something. The flawless RFP response, the flawless communication – that's sometimes a little bit suspicious. You gain more trust if you're open and willing to share your challenges."
Lee drew the same connection to partnership decisions: Cantarus chose to work with Umbraco in part because "we felt like we could see behind the curtain, and understand who you were as an organisation, what your aspirations were, how you saw your growth strategy with your partners."
The takeaway is a counterintuitive one: the organisations that inspire the most confidence are often the ones most willing to acknowledge what they don't know.
Perhaps the most vivid conceptual contribution Mats brought to the conversation was his reframing of strategy as a portfolio of bets rather than a set of must-win battles.
"There is no perfect strategy. If success were based upon just building a plan and executing on that plan, all companies would be successful. What resonates with me is putting bets – at the lowest cost possible – and then evaluating how things go."
He described three outcomes from any bet: it takes off beyond expectations (go all in), nothing happens (close it cleanly), or it sits somewhere ambiguous in the middle – and that third outcome, he argued, is where real leadership judgement is required: "When is it time to close it down? When is it time to actually go all in? That's what leadership is about."
One of Mats's recent examples was the opening of Umbraco's Australian office in January. "It wasn't a big bet – but going there in April and meeting partners, meeting someone at the gym who turned out to work at Auckland Transportation and had been using Umbraco for 15 years... that's such a beautiful thing. Taking the decision to put an office there has panned out better than I expected."
On the flip side, he was equally clear about the danger of being paralysed by the middle ground: “If you don’t dare to take that bet, you’re stuck. Analyse, paralyse, you never do anything, you won’t progress.”
Strategy isn’t a fixed plan – it’s a set of bets you’re willing to stand behind.
In practice, this is where many organisations struggle – not in setting strategy, but in knowing when to double down, and when to step away.
One of the most freeing ideas in the conversation was the distinction between planning and certainty.
Mats shared a story from his IBM days, about a colleague who unveiled an enormously detailed five-year project plan in Microsoft Project – then immediately told the room: "The only thing I know about this plan is that it's wrong. This will not happen. I guarantee you." And paradoxically, that honesty made the team look more credible, not less.
"We always need a plan," Mats said, "but the plan will change. The strategy of no strategy is perhaps the best strategy."
Lee echoed this with Cantarus' own approach to scenario planning: "We look at possible scenarios, some more likely than others based on the information we have – a realistic worst-case, a realistic best-case – and the reality tends to be somewhere in the middle. The value isn't in the plan itself. It's in the process of planning."
The implication for senior leaders: don’t mistake governance for certainty. Rigorous planning is important. Believing the plan will play out exactly as written is not.
Planning creates the illusion of control. Adaptability is what delivers results.
The implication is clear: planning is essential, but adaptability is what ultimately determines success.
Why do organisations default to technology as the solution?
Questions came through from the audience during the session, including a common one: why do organisations still fall into the trap of defaulting to technology as the solution?
Mats was direct: "There is a tendency to focus on the medicine rather than the root cause. Technology companies are good at promoting their solutions. Looking inward – really understanding the root cause behind your challenges – is more painful. So people quickly dive into: we bought a system, and that's going to sort it out."
He offered the classic example: "We all know someone who said, 'we don't have any clue about our customers, but now we bought Salesforce – that's going to be sorted out.' Salesforce won't sort out anything if the underlying structure isn't right."
Lee saw the same dynamic from the agency side: "Too often, technology is actually the enemy of agility within organisations. It can consume the entire budget, leaving very little to invest in change. And the technology itself can be incredibly difficult to extend or replace."
The leadership lesson: technology implementations are fundamentally change management projects. If the people and process work isn’t done first, the best software in the world will underperform.
What this reinforces – and what we consistently see across membership and public sector organisations – is that technology decisions often outpace organisational readiness. The result isn’t transformation, it’s friction.
Looking beyond the current hype cycle, Mats offered one of the most grounded perspectives on AI we've heard in a long time.
"We have constantly, with technology, overrated the short-term impact and underestimated the long-term impact. We did that with the internet. We did it with blockchain. We did it with big data. We're doing it now with AI. We are passing the hype now. 2025 was the demo year – everyone's blown away by what it can do. Now it's getting back to reality."
He drew the parallel to how the internet actually rolled out: "What took off first? Books. Electronics. Groceries and retail took ten years. It's exactly what's going to happen with AI. The low-hanging fruits – software development, legal document processing – we see those moving rapidly. Replacing human beings? That's not happening this year."
He also raised a pointed challenge on reliability: "We say AI is like having an additional co-worker. But whenever did it become acceptable to have a co-worker who randomly goes delusional? We kind of accept that with AI. But when it starts taking serious business decisions, replacing humans to drive your business – and can go delusional – that has compliance implications."
Umbraco's own AI strategy reflects this measured approach: open, composable, partner-enabling – rather than locking clients in with proprietary AI features built on top of a closed platform. "We will be the enablers for it," Mats said. "We let our partners build AI on top of our platform, based upon their knowledge and their discussions with their clients."
One of the conversation's quieter but most powerful insights came near the end, as Lee reflected on the chain of trust involved in delivering technology for clients.
"It's no use having all of those values yourself as an organisation if you then work with suppliers and partners who don't share them. We could be the most flexible, open partner in the world, but if we were dealing with a CMS vendor who wasn't adapting their product based on feedback – that would show to the end client."
Mats took that further: "When I realise you tell that story further on to your end customers, it's not just my own reputation at stake. It's also yours. There is a deeper responsibility to be a trustworthy supplier and partner in this."
In a sector that often reduces procurement to capability checklists and day rates, this is worth sitting with. The organisations that consistently deliver well are often the ones who have been most deliberate about cultural alignment across their entire supply chain.
What struck us most about this conversation wasn't any single idea – it was the consistency of the underlying philosophy. Whether Mats and Lee were talking about career decisions, product strategy, AI, or client relationships, the same principles kept surfacing: be transparent, know where you fit, make informed bets, stay adaptive, and measure relentlessly.
As Lee put it in his closing summary: "The key thing is to have the ability to see what's happening and react quickly – measure the success of your decisions, and change course where you need to."
That feels like the right note to end on. Not a call to have all the answers, but a call to build organisations that can find them faster than the competition. Most organisations don’t struggle because they lack capability – they struggle because those capabilities aren’t connected.
If this conversation resonated, the next Loom will go deeper into how organisations are approaching experience, data and long-term direction.
Get in touch to see how we can help you unlock the full potential of your organisation with Umbraco.