Most leaders like to think they’re making conscious, reasoned decisions. In reality, many of our choices are reflexes shaped by habits, patterns, and unseen biases that nudge us toward what feels familiar rather than what’s effective.

Codify how things get done in your business by mapping social relationships into your strategy and help improve how you achieve your strategic objectives.

Disruption is no longer an exception. It’s a certainty. We live in an era where change is continuous, constant, and often chaotic. With this disruption comes complexity, but it doesn’t always arrive as a single, overwhelming force. Instead, disruption moves across a spectrum of intensity, shaping how businesses must respond.

Too often, strategic foresight tools like environmental scanning are treated as a one-time task. It’s a box ticked in the early stages of strategic planning. The team gathers data, writes a summary, inserts it into a report—and moves on.

Job done.

Except it’s not.

Not if you’re leading in complexity.

Business leaders crave predictability and stability. When things are stable, we feel efficient and effective. The logic is that stability equals success.

Yet when uncertainty creeps in, sentiment spikes, emotions run high, and confidence erodes. We start to question whether our actions will even work — because we’ve never been here before.

COVID showed us that business strategy was not up to the task of dealing with disruption.   While the pandemic showed us we needed to adapt when disruption hit we also needed to have another look at the way we built key governance documents – like a strategy. When we did this we realised that the traditional approach was not up to the job.

When strategy is dynamic and the path unclear, emotional agility becomes a form of leadership intelligence. It’s not simply about staying calm under pressure—it’s about metabolising complexity into meaningful motion.

We are now in the time of Leader as Strategist — where leaders demonstrate the ability to forecast disruption and pivot in response while taking care to inspire and motivate a team to embrace change.

Change only sticks when the organisation has built dynamic capacity before the change begins.

Dynamic capacity means your people can adapt, absorb surprise, and stay connected while systems shift. It means you’ve built enough trust, clarity, and coordination that the next disruption feels navigable rather than exhausting.

That’s what navigating complexity develops — the ability to build this internal elasticity before the market, the mandate, or the moment demands it.