Premise:
For most of the 20th century, leadership has been about managing the known about optimizing for efficiency and reducing variance in every sphere of work.
But today, we live in a world where variance is the norm. The pace and scale of change around us mean that optimizing for efficiencies is a lost cause, maybe even a doomed cause and a recipe for disaster.
Leaders who succeed in the future will be those who make the shift from extrapolating the past to preparing for the future.
One can’t really predict the future; one can only prepare for it.
And preparation is less about strategy decks and more about organizational metabolism — how quickly your system senses, interprets, and adapts to the changes in the context.
The constraint is no longer lack of data. It is our ability to make meaning and derive insights from an abundance if data.
As leaders we need to learn the skill of strategic foresight and to some extent, we are all futurists now. We need to learn the skills and practice them like futurists.
Here are some key insights about what this means for all of us leaders:
Move From Prediction to Preparation
Futurists do not predict the future. They expand the field of plausible futures.
As leaders, our job is not to be right about one scenario, it is to build an organizational culture that can survive many different scenarios.
This requires a change-seeking culture — a culture which encourages radical curiosity, strategic imagination and relentless experiments.
The Mindset: Radical Curiosity
Curiosity is not a soft trait. It is a strategic capability.
As leaders, we must continue to be curious and seek answers to questions like:
- Among the shifts we see in our context, what is signal and what is noise?
- What assumptions are we carrying that no longer serve us?
- What would have to be true for a trend to matter to us?
One simple filter we can use when evaluating emerging trends is the 3R Test:
- Is it Relevant?
- Is it Reliable?
- Is it Responsible?
The goal is not to chase every wave. It is to catch and surf the right ones.
The skillset: Strategic Imagination
Imagination is a key skill that can help us create plausible futures, from the current reality.
As leaders, we must be able to imagine multiple plausible futures, based on the trends that we are seeing playing out right now. We can do that by asking simple questions like:
- How will this specific trend play out?
- How will this trend interact with the other trends that are playing out simultaneously?
The toolset: Rapid experimentation
One way for us to test and validate our understanding and remove biases is for us to design and run multiple experiments.
As with any scientific experiment, we need to arrive at a hypothesis based on the understanding created through radical curiosity and strategic imagination, and test that hypothesis by designing and running an experiment, which can either confirm our hypothesis or render it untrue.
This can then form the basis of all subsequent decisions we make to prepare our teams for the future.
Increasing Learning Velocity
In an ever-changing world, speed of learning becomes a competitive advantage.
Not speed of reaction, but the speed and the quality of our sensemaking.
Here are a few tools or frameworks that we can use to continue to learn and make sense of the context within which we operate:
Seek – Signal Scanning
In complex adaptive systems, small changes often precede or lead to major shifts. What looks like a minor regulatory tweak today may become tomorrow’s business model disruption.
What we are seeing right now with the tariff’s announced by Trump is a case in point.
As leaders, we must build distributed sensing mechanisms:
- Enable Customer-facing teams to feed weak signals (shift in perception or customer behavior) upward
- Create Cross-functional forums to connect seemingly unrelated dots within the organization
- Open communication channels where relevant information travels quickly and to the right stakeholders
The question is not “What do we know?”. The question is “What are the shifts that we are noticing?”
Sense – Scenario Planning
Robust organizations are not optimized for one future. They are resilient across many.
Scenario planning is not about storytelling. It is about stress-testing assumptions. This is something that is already common practice (or should have been) in most organizations.
This is asking “What if” questions:
- What if a key supplier disappears.
- What if AI commoditizes your core offering.
- What if regulation shifts overnight.
And figuring out what breaks first. The goal is not to predict the shock. It is to build redundancy and simple rules that hold under pressure and developing a plan for each one of these scenarios, in case they play out.
This is like training people to be prepared for a fire accident – you predict different scenarios, you build a plan for those scenarios and then you share them with all the concerned people (and if they are critical, then practice the plan).
Plan and Act – The Pre-Mortem
Before every major transformation, I ask teams to imagine this:
It is 18 months from now. The initiative has failed spectacularly.
Why?
This exercise surfaces hidden fragilities inside the system. It exposes political resistance. It reveals capability gaps.
Complex systems rarely fail because of one dramatic mistake. They fail because of accumulated unaddressed tensions.
The pre-mortem makes those tensions visible early.
It can also help us understand the key dependencies for success.
We can do the same thing to predict critical variables for success by asking a simple question – “What all needs to be true for this project or initiative to succeed beyond all expectations?”.
Building a Team That Can Keep Transforming
The ultimate goal is not successful transformation.
It is our ability to shift and respond to the changing context without getting overwhelmed or stuck, or in other words, continuous transformability.
That requires what I call Contextual Fluency — the ability to apply timeless leadership capabilities (trust, psychological safety, empathy, clarity of purpose) to highly specific emerging demands like AI literacy or sustainability transitions.
Two capabilities matter disproportionately:
Communication Through Uncertainty
In volatile environments, leaders cannot always provide answers. But they must provide orientation. Simple rules that when everyone follows, allowing for the right kind of emergent behavior that helps us thrive.
Purpose becomes the anchor when certainty is unavailable.
Accelerated Capability Building
Multiple studies suggest that a significant portion of today’s skills may be obsolete within this decade.
Capability building can no longer be episodic.
It must be embedded in daily work.
Learning must move from event-based to workflow-based.
Machines and algorithms will not stop learning, neither should we.
As leaders, it is our responsibility to ensure that we are putting in enough energy, attention and resources to enable our teams to learn in proportion to the same being deployed for AI tools to learn and get better.
Conclusion:
Leadership today is less about control.
It is about designing the conditions for adaptive intelligence to emerge.
The leaders worth following will not be those who promise certainty. They will be those who build systems that can navigate uncertainty and thrive.
