A surprising number of media training participants have asked me why they can't just speak their minds like Donald Trump. They admire his courage to say what he thinks. They find it refreshing and authentic to get an unvarnished, warts-and-all view on virtually every topic imaginable, even if they disagree with it.

In the whole Brexit chaos, the person who has impressed me the most is the former Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow. He has ensured that the agenda and the rules of the House have been followed, that parliamentarians wishing to speak got their turn, and he has waded into the frequently unruly debate to keep "OOORRDEERRRR!"

If the 2010s were the decade of cloud computing and big data, the 2020s will see a torrential downpour. Already more than 20 billion IoT devices are contributing data. Smart cities will add to that, as will Enterprise Content Management and Machine Learning. These will threaten to drown business leaders that have to derive insights and plan strategies based on veritable oceans of data.

My clients for media skills and executive presence training are almost exclusively senior business and government leaders. But when National University of Singapore asked me a few years ago to coach their top MBA students, I accepted. The opportunity to contribute to the development of future business and government leaders was too good to pass up.

Read the headline again. Isn’t it crazy that in the 2020s your corporate communications team is going to have to grapple with such strange media enquiries.

You only need to look to Greenland’s melting glaciers, or the increased severity of storms, to know climate change is already upon us. All we can hope for in the 2020s is to stop it getting worse, or to adjust to its impact.

Please can we retire "Before I start" from keynote presenters' vocabularies.

Let’s get real – there is no such thing as artificial intelligence (AI) yet. At best, when people talk about Artificial Intelligence they really mean machine learning. By some predictions, we won’t see truly intelligent machines until the 2030s or later.

To answer this question, let's bring to mind a typical conference experience: The brief interactive plenary presentation is nearing its climax, a focused audience of conference delegates has keenly taken in the handful of highly-engaging visual materials and is waiting with baited breath to hear the expert speaker's conclusion. When the invitation to ask questions comes, a dozen hands shoot up urgently and implore the emcee to hear theirs first.

This question came up in conversation with one of my clients recently. Where do you stand?