THE URGENT NEED FOR SOPHISTICATED LEADERSHIP

The pandemic has highlighted a series of paradoxes inherent to the work of leaders. What comes next will depend on how well leaders face up to them.

- BLAIR SHEPPARD and SUSANNAH ANFIELD

IN THE 2019 PwC Global Crisis Survey, 69 percent of respondents said they expected a global crisis in the next five years, most likely due to a financial meltdown or technology failure. Little did they know how soon the crisis would come. Just nine months after the survey was released, an entirely different and unexpected medical and public health crisis — COVID-19 — has fundamentally altered the world. If driving change in the uncertain and turbulent environment that existed at the beginning of 2020 was a complex challenge, the degree of difficulty has now been ramped up significantly.

As we recently noted in these pages, five global forces — asymmetry of wealth, disruption, age disparities, polarization, and loss of trust — which together we’ve termed ADAPT, were already changing the way millions of people live and work (see “Adapting to a new world,” s+b, May 13, 2020). The pandemic has sharply accelerated these forces. As a result, organizations have even less time than they thought to reconfigure themselves so that they can maintain their viability in a vastly changed world. In our new book, we predict that humanity has “10 years to midnight.” But with events moving so quickly, it seems there may be even less time until the fateful hour. The good news is that by recognizing the challenges confronting society, internalizing the lessons of the pandemic, and deploying the tools and technologies at hand, we can chart a new, more adaptive course. But doing so is going to place a fresh set of demands and intense pressures on leaders.

The six paradoxes of leadership