Surviving in a continuously disrupted world requires curiosity and adaptability
Writing Nadya Zhexembayeva
I never thought a five-year-old could teach me something profound about leadership. But there I was in Venice, asking my daughter Lila what she remembered most from our walking tour. While adults spoke of gondolas and Venetian gothic architecture, she had a different perspective entirely.
“Butts,” she said matter-of-factly.
After confirming that I had heard her correctly, Lila explained her answer with perfect logic: “I am very short, mom. And the streets are narrow and jam-packed with people. So all day, I kept staring at many, many butts. That’s all.”
While we were experiencing Venice, she was seeing something completely different. This crystallized something I’ve been witnessing across boardrooms worldwide. Leaders are trying to sell their teams “Venice” – beautiful visions of the future, inspiring strategies, transformational initiatives. But their people are stuck staring at the equivalent of butts – endless disruption, constant pivoting, and the exhausting reality that nothing stays stable long enough to master. The gap between what leaders think they’re communicating and what their teams are actually experiencing has never been wider. And it’s breaking people.
I was born in the Soviet Union at a time when getting sour cream required hours of hunting and line-standing. When I was growing up, three individuals signed a document that dissolved the entire USSR overnight, making 15 republics suddenly independent. Our world collapsed. In my family alone, we lost four people to suicide during that transition.
So when I tell leaders that reinvention isn’t optional, it’s not academic theory. It’s survival knowledge learned the hardest way possible.
Today, I work with executives drowning in what feels like continuous crisis. They’re exhausted from managing transformation fatigue while trying to stay ahead of disruptions that arrive monthly, if not weekly. They keep asking: “When do we get back to normal?” Here’s the brutal truth: normal isn’t coming back.
The world that created our current leadership models – the stable, predictable 20th century business world, where you could reinvent every 30-40 years and coast on efficiency – is gone. My 2024 research shows nearly 20% of companies now need to reinvent every 12 months or less just to survive. More than half must reinvent every three years or less.
Yet most leaders are still playing by yesterday’s rules, wondering why their teams are burning out, why change initiatives keep failing, and why they feel like they’re losing their minds trying to create stability in an inherently unstable world. The rules of leadership have fundamentally changed. The question is: have you?
The death of predictable leadership
For most of modern business history, leadership was about optimization within known parameters. You figured out the best way to do something, then perfected it for decades. Henry Ford’s assembly line. McDonald’s operational excellence. The Japanese quality movement. These weren’t just business strategies: they were leadership philosophies built on the assumption that the world would stay relatively the same, long enough for mastery to matter.
That assumption is now toxic. McKinsey research shows the average lifespan of companies on the S&P 500 has shrunk from 61 years in 1958 to less than 18 years today. Of the original Fortune 500 companies from 1955, only 60 still exist – a sinking rate of 88%.
The reality behind failing change initiatives reveals a deeper issue: we’re asking people to navigate perpetual turbulence using psychological contracts designed for stable conditions.
In the 20th century, employees and employers had an implicit deal: support occasional transformation initiatives, and in exchange, enjoy long periods of stability. But that world no longer exists. Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace shows only 21% of employees globally are engaged, while 15% are “loudly quitting” – actively undermining their organizations. Manager engagement has plummeted from 30% to 27%. That’s creating a cascading crisis, since 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager.
The data reveals why this deal has broken down. Accenture’s 2024 Pulse of Change Index shows the rate of change affecting businesses has risen 183% since 2019. Our research at Reinvention Academy confirms this acceleration: 22.5% of organizations now reinvent themselves every 12 months or less – the highest velocity we’ve ever recorded. Yet most leaders run their companies as if speed isn’t here, insisting that: “We are too big to fail,” or “too good to sink,” or “we’ve done it a hundred times.”
I call this the Titanic Syndrome – a corporate disease where organizations facing disruption create their own downfall through arrogance, excessive attachment to past success, or inability to recognize the new reality.
The Titanic’s crew ignored six iceberg warnings because they were busy keeping first-class passengers happy. They had no binoculars in the crow’s nest because overconfidence made them think they didn’t need them. Their previous success at averting collisions made them rely on outdated tactics when facing an unprecedented situation. Sound familiar?
The leaders who survive and thrive aren’t the ones trying to recreate yesterday’s stability. They’re the ones learning to lead through perpetual turbulence without losing their minds – or their teams.
Five leadership shifts for the continuously disrupted world
Shift 1: From perfection to progress
The old leadership mantra was “Measure twice, cut once.” The new reality demands a different approach: “Cut, measure, adjust, repeat.” This isn’t about being sloppy: it’s about recognizing that in a world where the right answer changes monthly, perfect execution of yesterday’s solution is a guaranteed path to irrelevance.
At online workspace Miro, chief executive Andrey Khusid built this principle into the company’s DNA. When Covid hit and demand exploded, they didn’t spend months perfecting their response. They shipped features weekly, gathered user feedback in real-time, and iterated constantly. The result? They grew from 3.5 million to 50 million users during the pandemic while their more ‘careful’ competitors struggled to adapt.
You’re not the master planner anymore. You’re the chief experimenter, constantly testing assumptions and pivoting based on what you learn.
Shift 2: From efficiency to effectiveness
Efficiency is about doing things right; effectiveness is about doing the right things. In a stable world, once you figured out the right things, efficiency became the competitive advantage. In a turbulent world, the ‘right things’ keep changing, making efficiency a trap.
BMW’s transformation from a car company to a mobility company illustrates this perfectly. Instead of just making more efficient cars, they asked a more fundamental question: what do people actually need? The answer led to DriveNow car-sharing services, a joint venture with Sixt, where customers can pick up anywhere and drop off anywhere, with per-minute billing. They stopped optimizing the old business model and started reimagining the entire value proposition.
For leaders, this means constantly asking not just “How can we do this better?” but “Should we be doing this at all?”
Shift 3: From competition to coopetition
The old competitive playbook was zero-sum: their loss is your gain. But in a resource-constrained, rapidly changing world, sometimes the best strategy is to cooperate with competitors to create entirely new markets.
Consider the partnership between Microsoft and Apple. Despite being fierce competitors, they collaborate extensively on productivity software, cloud services and emerging technologies. Why? Because the real competition isn’t between them – it’s between human-centric technology and the chaos of digital fragmentation.
This shift requires leaders to think beyond traditional industry boundaries. Your biggest opportunity might come from partnering with someone you’ve always considered a rival.
Shift 4: From projects to processes
This is perhaps the most critical shift, and the one most leaders resist. We’re conditioned to think of change as having a beginning, middle and end. But in a world of continuous disruption, change isn’t a project. It’s a process.
At Huawei, 151,000 of their 207,000 employees are co-owners. This isn’t just an ownership structure – it’s a reinvention system. When trade sanctions devastated their smartphone business, they didn’t form a special task force. The entire organization swarmed the problem, bringing diverse perspectives to bear on finding new growth areas like smart car technology and mining solutions. The implication: you need to build organizational capability for continuous reinvention, not just manage occasional transformations.
Shift 5: From career ladders to career portfolios
The final shift is personal, and it’s critical for leadership credibility. You can’t ask your teams to embrace continuous reinvention if you’re still thinking about your own career in linear terms.
The new leadership career looks more like a portfolio: multiple simultaneous paths that reinforce and enrich each other. This portfolio approach isn’t just about personal resilience – it’s about developing the cognitive flexibility required to lead in uncertainty.
Leading without losing your mind
To lead effectively without losing your mind, focus on these three practical steps alongside the five leadership shifts.
Apply the Venice Principle to decision-making
Remember my daughter in Venice? The key lesson isn’t just about perspective-taking – it’s about building systematic processes to escape your own viewpoint. Before making any significant decision, ask: “What are three completely different ways to interpret this situation?”
One global mining company I work with requires three people from different departments to present any major initiative from their unique perspectives before approval. Often, they discover they’re solving entirely different problems.
But the Venice Principle goes deeper. In a world of constant change, your view of ‘Venice’ might be completely wrong. What you think is your greatest opportunity might be the thing that kills you. The most powerful application is in strategic planning: instead of starting with your assumptions about the market, start by mapping out how your customers, competitors, and regulators each see the same situation.
Create psychological safety for perpetual change
Here’s the paradox: the more change you need from people, the more security they need to feel. This isn’t touchy-feely leadership – it’s a practical necessity. People who are afraid of making mistakes will default to familiar solutions, exactly when you need them to experiment with new approaches.
Coastal Community Credit Union solved this by closing their organization for a day to get everyone aligned on the reality of continuous change. Instead of pretending change would eventually stop, they made it clear that adaptability was now a core job requirement for everyone. Counterintuitively, this honesty reduced anxiety, because people could stop waiting for stability and start building skills for thriving in turbulence.
Psychological safety in a continuously changing environment means being honest about what you don’t know. Undertake regular ‘uncertainty audits’ where you explicitly acknowledge what you don’t know and what you’re watching for.
Master your role as navigator, not controller
A fundamental leadership identity shift is required. Stop trying to be the person who creates certainty and start being the person who helps others navigate uncertainty with confidence. This doesn’t mean abandoning planning – it means planning for multiple scenarios simultaneously. It doesn’t mean fighting chaos – it means building systems that can thrive within it. It doesn’t mean constant change for its own sake – it means continuous adaptation in service of unchanging values.
The leaders I see thriving share one critical characteristic: they’ve made peace with not knowing what’s coming next. They’ve replaced the illusion of control with the skill of rapid adaptation. They’ve stopped trying to predict the future and started building the capability to succeed in multiple possible futures.
In practice, this means getting comfortable with phrases like “I don’t know, but here’s how we’ll find out,” and “Our plan will probably change, but here’s our starting direction.” It means celebrating course corrections as signs of intelligence, not failure. Most importantly, it means modeling the behavior you want to see: curiosity over certainty, adaptation over stubbornness, learning over knowing.
Learning to see the world differently
Like my daughter in Venice, we all see the world from our own vantage point. But the leaders who thrive in perpetual turbulence learn to see from multiple perspectives simultaneously – and to guide others through uncertainty with confidence rather than false promises of stability.
The old rules promised that if you worked hard enough and planned carefully enough, you could create stability. The new rules promise something better: if you learn fast enough and adapt wisely enough, you can thrive in any conditions. The choice is yours. But choose quickly – the world isn’t waiting for you to decide.
Dr Nadya Zhexembayeva is founder and chief reinvention officer of The Reinvention Academy (USA)
