Transformative leadership for extraordinary times
What’s different now
Leaders today are facing unique circumstances. In the short term, they must deal with a succession of immediate crises, including inflation, supply chain disruption, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the threat of recession, and labor market disruptions. In the long term, they face deep and profound megatrends—climate change, technological disruption, demographic shifts, a fracturing world, and social instability—that touch everyone on the planet.
What’s unique is not only the frequency of the crises and the severity of the megatrends, but the fact that the megatrends are causing and accentuating the crises. Therefore, leaders must deal with the present and the emerging future together. They must transform their organization for a world being reshaped by the megatrends, while making sure that their responses to immediate crises accelerate this transformation.
The changes required to position organizations for success in a world dominated by the megatrends will be unlike anything leaders have previously experienced. Take climate change. The transition to a sustainable world requires a complete reconfiguration of the industrial system—how we feed ourselves; how we move around; and how we build, power, and make things. This massive and complex undertaking will affect every organization, in every sector, and in every region. It sits above any single industry and requires the simultaneous transformation of thousands of players that are highly interdependent; involves massive demand-side and supply-side changes; and needs to happen at speed and at scale.
At the same time, technological disruption requires organizations to reimagine how work gets done and, in many cases, reinvent the fundamentals of their business models. Self-driving cars and trucks will revolutionize delivery services and transportation networks; machine learning algorithms can already analyze medical images, patient records, and genetic data to assist in early disease detection and personalized treatment plans; automated content-creation tools can generate articles, design logos, and compose music, transforming creative industries that many thought would be somewhat protected from technological disruptions. Add other advances, such as quantum computing, blockchain, and sector-specific technologies, and leadership teams will need to reinvent the value their organization creates and how it does so in order to remain relevant and to secure investment.
In this environment, not only is the need for change more ubiquitous, but the nature of the transformations required is different—the magnitude of change, the speed at which it needs to happen, the number and diversity of constituencies to bring along, and the impact these transformations will have on stakeholders whom leaders might not have considered in the past.
Finally, consider the ongoing nature of the transformation that these systemic changes require. Leaders need to build an ongoing transformation capability that enables their organization to keep challenging itself, evolving, and adapting.
